Your Weekly Business Buzzword Bullshit

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Business people these days are seemingly obsessed with sounding much more intelligent than they really are. The fact that many of our coworkers can tell the difference between a hole in the ground and their respective assholes is, in some cases, nothing short of a miracle.

Although many different professions require fluency in a complicated language full of technical terminology, jargon and acronyms, employees in professions other than these have decided that they too need to have an insiders-only set of words to make themselves sound more knowledgeable. This week, I’ll begin with some of the more common and tired phrases.

“At The End Of The Day”

At my former job, I could not get through a meeting of any length without hearing this phrase at least twice. The longer the meeting, the more I heard it. This phrase is the speaker’s pathetic attempt to illustrate that he or she fully understands the goal as well as the profound realization of how it impacts the department and/or company. In reality, it illustrates that the speaker has become so brainwashed by company culture, it’s likely that any conversation with this person will contain 40% commercialese and 60% unnecessary anecdotes.

“Flesh Out”

Not only is this term overused, all too often I hear coworkers use the term “Flush out” instead. Are you fucking kidding me?! There have been more times than I can count when I would love to tell my boss that he’s welcome to go “flush out” that dumbass project he tasked me with, since I know it’s going to be a waste of time and therefore about as valuable as the 20 minutes I spent dropping a deuce and playing JetPack Joyride in the bathroom a while ago. You know what words work just as well as “flesh out?” “Develop” or “expand” or even just “improve” for fuck’s sake. If you are using “flesh out” in regular business conversation, please – regain some of your identity. If you’re using “flush out” in serious daily conversation, find the nearest cliff (or bridge, depending on your geographic location), and jump.

“Pull The Trigger”

We’ve all heard this one. Whether it means to hit the “send” button in an email, begin a project, publish something on the web, or any other project that is going from the development stage out into the big wide world. I confess, when I hear my superiors use this phrase, there is a different mental connotation I associate with it simply because I’m so sick of hearing it.

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Spaceman Spiff

Now a graduate with a few years of business "experience", Spiff didn't exactly turn into the interplanetary explorer extraordinaire he had hoped to become. Instead, he spends his days as a cynical desk jockey, moonlighting as a Contributing Writer for PGP and marching ever closer to the big 3-0, which has only fueled his transition from quarter-life crisis straight into thrisis.