If you work on the Web, sooner or later you brush up against Information Technology (IT) professionals. Maybe you even are one, or like me, play one when necessary to make the mortgage. All industries invent new words to describe their processes—buzzwords—but for some reason, the IT world has never met a buzzword it doesn’t like. You know, words like “dot-com” (a company doing business on the Internet, usually funded with venture capital), “drill down” (delving deeper into a body of information), and “Generation D” (the digital generation; the first not defined by age).
Usually buzzwords are used to make the speaker appear more knowledgeable by making concepts that should be clear and easily comprehended as fuzzy and incomprehensible as possible. Sometimes they’re used to tart up a relatively mundane concept, almost always for marketing purposes.
Lately, buzzwords have been morphed into second, and sometimes even third, alternate definitions. For example, consider “bandwidth.” Traditionally it’s been used to define the rate of electronic information flow. Now it’s used to describe personal resources like time (“do you have enough personal bandwidth available to take on another project this year?).
There’s a program for the Palm Pilot, Buzzword Bingo, that’s been around for quite a while. The original concept was based on a Dilbert comic. It works just like regular bingo except it uses buzzwords for scoring squares instead of the usual “B3” and “D5.” When you win, your Palm Pilot plays a little melody. It’s notorious in certain organizations and probably banned in a few.
Consulting companies are notorious for engaging in buzzword warfare. A few months ago, I attended a meeting at a Fortune 100 company for which I’m performing IT consulting services. One of the presenters was a representative from one of those big-time East coast consulting outfits. His central message was “disintermediation” (the process of bypassing the middleman in transactions, originally coined by Stan Davis almost 20 years ago). Yesterday I attended another meeting at the same client site featuring an address by a representative from yet another (different and competing) big-time consulting outfit. His buzzword for the day was “radical re-intermediation.” Go figure.
At least someone’s trying to keep score of all this crap for us. Take a look at John Walston’s BuzzWhack. Not only is he keeping up with all the buzzword morphing, he’ll gladly email you a buzzword of the day and/or the week and if you register he’ll let you download his Buzzword Compliant dictionary. Best of all, he solicits your buzzword additions. Walston was formerly an assistant managing editor at USA Today and executive editor of the Wilmington News Journal, so he knows his stuff.
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