Sunday, September 5, 2010

Un-suck it

I found a website that translates terrible business jargon into English. Here's an example taken from work. Our executive assistant hates this word, particularly since she looked it up and found out it means illegal, as in the authorities can take action against you if you do something actionable.


Actionable

Her feedback didn’t relate to anything actionable.

Unsucked:


Doable or achievable.
The douchebag who said this probably also said End-to-EndGo Forward Plan, orTable This.


I browsed some of their terms and was surprised to see bandwidth. I use that all the time! I didn't know it was douchey! I think I should get special dispensation since I used to design cable equipment and really know exactly what it means. And I never use bandwidth to mean time and people. If I say I don't have the bandwidth for dating right now it means my mind is occupied with work and renovations and I don't have any brain power left to try to coddle some man's ego. I will talk to somebody if they have ideas for how to hang two kayaks on the wall, but if they aren't fault tolerant to my occasionally missing packets then they can just wait until I shut down one of these processes and HAVE MORE BANDWIDTH!

2 comments:

  1. I have many quibbles with that site. Jargon only sucks when used outside of its legitimate domain. They list bottleneck, and suggest "slow down" as being better. Well, no. Bottleneck has a very specific meaning, and "slow down" ain't it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. When you get down to it, "doable" is also rather douche-y, particularly in its infelicitous sound, and "achievable" just looks sesquipedalian. I'd throw 'em both overboard in favor of "feasible," which has been out of fashion long enough that it's due a revival.

    ReplyDelete