More Buzzword Bingo

These phrases on the left are apparently serious efforts of office people trying to communicate something meaningful, plus their actual meanings. A recent Local Government initiative in the UK banned these words. Sense at last has prevailed!


Across-the-piece - everyone working together

Actioned - do

Advocate - support

Area based - in an area

Area focused - concentrating on the area

Autonomous - independent

Baseline - starting point

Benchmarking - measuring

Best Practice - best way

Blue sky thinking - thinking up ideas

Bottom-Up - listening to people

Can do culture - get the job done

Capacity - ability

Capacity building - enough room in the system

Cascading - why use at all?

Cautiously welcome - devil in the detail

Challenge - problem

Citizen empowerment - people power

Client - person

Cohesiveness - together

Collaboration - working together

Commissioning - buy

Community engagement - getting people involved

Consensual - everyone agree

Contextual - background

Core developments - main things that are happening

Core Message - main point

Core principles - beliefs

Coterminosity - all singing from the same hymn sheet

Cross-cutting - everyone working together

Cross-fertilisation - spreading idea

Democratic legitimacy - voted in

Democratic mandate - elected to put people first

Dialogue - talk/discuss

Direction of travel - way forward

Distorts spending priorities - ignores people's needs

Early Win - success

Embedded - set in

Empowerment - people power

Enabler - helps

Engagement - working with people

Engaging users -- getting people involved

Enhance - improve

Evidence Base - research shows

Exemplar - example

External challenge - outside pressures

Facilitate - help

Fast-Track - speed up

Flexibilities and Freedoms - more power to do the right thing

Framework - guide

Fulcrum - pivot

Functionality - use

Funding Streams - money

Going forward - in the future

Good Practice - best way

Governance - Why use at all?

Guidelines - guide

Holistic - taken in the round

Improvement levers - using the tools to get the job done

Incentivising - incentive

Income Streams - money/cash

Indicators - measurements

Initiative - idea

Inspectorates - monitoring bodies

Interdepartmental - working together

Interface - talking to each other

Joined up - working together

Joint working - working together

Level playing field - everyone equal

Leverage - influence

Localities - places/town/city/village

Lowlights - worst bits

Meaningful consultation- talking to people

Meaningful dialogue - talking to people

Mechanisms - methods

Menu of Options - choices

Multi-agency -- many groups

Multidisciplinary - many

Municipalities - towns/cities/areas

Normalising - make normal

Outcomes - results

Outcomes - focused

Output - results

Outsourced - privatised

Parameter - limits

Participatory - joining in

Partnership working - working together

Partnerships - working together

Place shaping - creating places where people can thrive

Pooled budgets - money

Pooled resources - time and money

Populace - people

Potentialities - chances

Practitioners - experts

Preventative services - protecting the most vulnerable

Prioritization - most important

Priority - most important

Process driven - shouldn't everything be people driven?

Procure - buy

Procurement - buying

Promulgate - spread

Proportionality - in proportion

Protocol - guidance

Quick Hit - success

Quick Win - success

Rationalisation - cut

Reconfigured - reform

Resource allocation - money going to the right place

Revenue Streams - money

Risk based - safest way

Robust - tough

Scaled-back - cut/reduce

Scoping - work out

Seedbed - idea

Service users - people

Shared priority -- all working together

Signpost - point in the direction of

Single conversations - talking to

Single Point of Contact - everything under one roof

Situational - situation

Slippage - delay

Social contracts - deal

Social exclusion - poverty

Stakeholder - other organisations

Step Change - improve

Strategic - planned

Strategic priorities - planned

Streamlined - efficient

Sub-regional - work between councils

Sustainable - long term

Sustainable communities - environmentally friendly

Symposium - meeting

Tested for Soundness -- what works

Thematic - theme

Third sector - charities and voluntary organisations

Toolkit - guidance

Top-Down - ignores people

Trajectory - route

Tranche - slice

Transformational - change

Transparency - clear

Upward trend - getting better

Utilise - use

Value-added - extra

Vision -- ideal/dream/belief

Visionary - ideal/dream/belief

Welcome - necessary and needed/step in the right direction

Wellbeing - healthy

Worklessness - unemployed

The Location of Meaning - The Stony Rosetta.

(Apologies to Douglas R Hofstadter)

Below is a selection of meaningful sentences in some of the more obscure languages.


Uppermost on the left is an inscription in the undeciphered boustrophedonic writing system from Easter Island, in which every second line is upside down. The characters are chiseled on a wooden tablet, 4 inches by 35 inches. Moving clockwise, we encounter vertically written Mongolian: above, present-day Mongolian, below, a document dating from 1314. Then we come to a poem in Bengali by Rabindran Tagore in the bottom right hand corner. Next to it is a newspaper headline in Malayalam (II Kerala, southern India), above which is the elegant curvilinear language Tamil (F Kerala). The smallest entry is part of a folk tale in Buginese (Celebes Island, Indonesia). In center of the collage is a paragraph in the Thai language, and above it a manuscript in Rn dating from the fourteenth century, containing a sample of the provincial law of Scania (so Sweden). Finally, wedged in on the left is a section of the laws of Hammurabi, written Assyrian cuneiform.

The diversity of language is almost as widespread as the cultures that produce them.

Buzzword Bingo

Office-Speak: The Art of saying something Very Ordinary using Flowery Speech. These are only a few of many examples of serious people trying to commmunicate something to others. Has English really been reduced to this? (From an article on the BBC website)

BEWARE! EXTREMELY FUNNY

1. "When I worked for Verizon, I found the phrase going forward to be more sinister than annoying. When used by my boss - sorry, "team leader" - it was understood to mean that the topic of conversation was at an end and not be discussed again."
Nima Nassefat, Vancouver, Canada

2. "My employers (top half of FTSE 100) recently informed staff that we are no longer allowed to use the phrase brain storm because it might have negative connotations associated with fits. We must now take idea showers. I think that says it all really."
Anonymous, England

3. At my old company (a US multinational), anyone involved with a particular product was encouraged to be a product evangelist. And software users these days, so we hear, want to be platform atheists so that their computers will run programs from any manufacturer."
Philip Lattimore, Thailand

4. "Incentivise is the one that does it for me."
Karl Thomas, Perth, Scotland

5. "My favourite which I hear from the managers at the bank I work for is let's touch base about that offline. I think it means have a private chat but I am still not sure."
Gemma, Wolverhampton, England

6. "Have you ever heard the term loop back which means go back to an associate and deal with them?"
Scott Reed, Lakeland, Florida, US

7-8. "We used to collect the jargon used in a list and award the person with the most at the end of the year. The winner was a client manager with the classic you can't turn a tanker around with a speed boat change. What? Second was we need a holistic, cradle-to-grave approach, whatever that is."
Turner, Manchester

9. "Until recently I had to suffer working for a manager who used phrases such as the idiotic I've got you in my radar in her speech, letters and e-mails. Once, when I mentioned problems with the phone system, she screamed 'NO! You don't have problems, you have challenges'. At which point I almost lost the will to live."
Stephen Gradwick, Liverpool

10. "You can add challenge to the list. Problems are no longer considered problems, they have morphed into challenges."
Irene MacIntyre, Courtenay, B

11. "Business speak even supersedes itself and does so with silliness, the shorthand for quick win is now low hanging fruit."
Paul, Formby, UK

12. "And looking under the bonnet."
Eve Russell, Edinburgh

13-14. "The business-speak that I abhor is pre-prepare and forward planning. Is there any other kind of preparedness or planning?"
Edward Creswick, Exeter

15-16. "The one that really gets me is pre-plan - there is no such thing. Either you plan or you don't. The new one which has got my goat is conversate, widely used to describe a conversation. I just wish people could learn to 'think outside the box' although when they put us in cubes what do they expect?"
Malcolm, Houston

17. "I work in one of those humble call centres for a bank. Apparently, what we're doing at the moment is sprinkling our magic along the way. It's a call centre, not Hogwarts."
Caroline Garlick, Ayrshire

18. "A pet hate is the utterly pointless expression in this space. So instead of the perfectly adequate 'how can I help?' it's 'how can I help in this space?' Or the classic I heard on Friday, 'How can we help our customers in this space going forward?' I think I may have caught this expression at source, as I've yet to hear it said outside my own working environment. So I'm on a personal crusade to stamp it out before it starts infecting other City institutions. Wish me luck in this space."
Colin, London

19. "The one phrase that inspires a rage in me is from the get-go."
Andy, Herts

20. "'Going forward' is only half the phrase that gets up my nose - all politicians seem to use the phrase go forward together. 'We must... we shall... let us now... go forward together'. It gives me a terrible mental image of the whole country linking arms and goose-stepping in unison, with the politicians out in front doing a straight-armed salute. Is it just me?"
Frances Smith, Toronto, Canada

21. "I am a financial journalist and am on a mission to remove words and phrases such as 360-degree thinking from existence."
Richard, London

22. "The latest that's stuck in my head is we are still optimistic things will feed through the sales and delivery pipeline (ie: we actually haven't sold anything to anyone yet but maybe we will one day)."
Alexander, Southampton

23. "I worked in PR for many years and often heard the most ludicrous phrases uttered by CEOs and marketing managers. One of the best was, we'd better not let the grass grow too long on this one. To this day it still echoes in my ears and I giggle to myself whenever I think about it. I can't help but think insecure business people use such phrases to cover up their inability for proper articulation."
Leon Reilly, Ealing, London

24. "Need to get all my ducks in a row now - before the five-year-olds wake up."
Mark Dixon, Bridgend

25. "Australians have started to use auspice as a verb. Instead of saying, 'under the auspices of...', some people now say things like, it was auspiced by..."
Martin Pooley, Marrickville, Australia

26. "My favourite: we've got our fingers down the throat of the organisation of that nodule. Translation = Er, no, WE sorted out the problems to cover your backside."
Theo de Bray, Kettering, UK

27. "The health service in Wales is filled with managers who use this type of language as a substitute for original thought. At meetings we play health-speak bingo; counting the key words lightens the tedium of meetings - including, most recently, my door is open on this issue. What does that mean?"
Edwin Pottle, Llandudno

28-29. "The business phrase I find most irritating is close of play, which is only slightly worse than actioning something."
Ellie, London

30. "Here in the US we have the cringe-worthy and also in addition. Then there's the ever-eloquent 'where are we at?' So far, I haven't noticed the UK's at the end of the day prefacing much over here; thank heavens for small mercies."
Eithne B, Chicago, US

31. "The expression that drives me nuts is 110%, usually said to express passion/commitment/support by people who are not very good at maths. This has created something of a cliche-inflation, where people are now saying 120%, 200%, or if you are really REALLY committed, 500%. I remember once the then-chancellor Gordon Brown saying he was 101% behind Tony Blair, to which people reacted 'What? Only 101?'"
Ricardo Molina, London, UK

32. "My least favourite business-speak term is not enough bandwidth. When an employee used this term to refuse an additional assignment, I realised I was completely 'out of the loop'."
April, Berkeley, US

33. "I once had a boss who said, 'You can't have your cake and eat it, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music.' It was in that moment I knew I had to resign before somebody got badly hurt by a pencil."
Tim, Durban

34. "Capture your colleagues - make sure everyone attends that risk management workshop (compulsory common sense training for idiots)."
Anglowelsh, UK

35-37. "We too used to have daily paradigm shifts, now we have stakeholders who must come to the party or be left out, or whatever."
Barry Hicks, Cape Town, RSA

38. "I have taken to playing buzzword bingo when in meetings. It certainly makes it more entertaining when I am feeding it back (or should that be cascading) at work."
Ian Everett, Bolton

39. "In my work environment it's all cascading at the moment. What they really mean is to communicate or disseminate information, usually downwards. What they don't seem to appreciate is that it sounds like we're being wee'd on. Which we usually are."
LMD, London

40. "At a large media company where I once worked, the head of human resources - itself a weaselly neologism for personnel - told us that she would be cascading down new information to staff. What she meant was she was going to send them a memo. It was one of the reasons I resigned - that, and the fact that the chief exec persisted on referring to the company as a really cool train set."
Andrew, London

41. "Working for an American corporation, this year's favourite word seems to be granularity, meaning detail. As in 'down to that level of granularity'."
Chris Daniel, Anaco, Venezuela

42. "On the wall of our office we have a large signed certificate, signed by all the senior management team, in which they solemnly promise to leverage their talents, display and inspire 'unyielding integrity', and lots of other pretentious buzz-phrases like that. Clueless, the lot of them."
Chris K, Cheltenham UK

43. "After a reduction in workforce, my university department sent this notice out to confused campus customers: 'Thank you for your note. We are assessing and mitigating immediate impacts, and developing a high-level overview to help frame the conversation with our customers and key stakeholders. We intend to start that process within the week. In the meantime, please continue to raise specific concerns or questions about projects with my office via the Transition Support Center..."
Charles R, Seattle, Washington, US

44. "I was told I'd be living the values from now on by my employers at a conference the other week. Here's some modern language for them - meh. A shame as I strongly believe in much of what my employers aim to do. I refuse to adopt the voluntary sectors' client title of 'service user'. How is someone who won't so much as open the door to me using my service? Another case of using four syllables where one would do."
Upscaled Blue-Sky thinker, Cardiff

45. "Business talk 2.0 is maddening, meaningless, patronising and I despise it."
Doug, London

46. "Lately I've come across the strategic staircase. What on earth is this? I'll tell you; it's office speak for a bit of a plan for the future. It's not moving on but moving up. How strategic can a staircase really be? A lot I suppose, if you want to get to the top without climbing over all your colleagues."
Peter Walters, Cheadle Hulme, UK

47. "When a stock market is down why must we be told it is in negative territory?"
Phil Linehan, Mexico City, Mexico

48. "The particular phrase I love to hate is drill down, which handily can be used either as an adverb/verb combo or as a compound noun, ie: 'the next level drill-down', sometimes even in the same sentence - a nice bit of multi-tasking."
B, London

49. "Thanks for the impactful article; I especially appreciated the level of granularity. A high altitude view often misses the siloed thinking typical of most businesses. Absent any scheme for incentivitising clear speech, however, I'm afraid we're stuck with biz-speak."
Timothy Denton, New York

50. "It wouldn't do the pinstripers any harm to crack a smile and say what they really felt once in a while instead of trotting out such clinical platitudes. Of course a group of them may need to workshop it first: Wouldn't want to wrongside the demographic."
Trick Cyclist, Tripoli, Libya