"Corporate Speak': please share examples

I learned to tremble with fear anytime I saw the word "hypercare" in a meeting invite. It pretty much means 20 people around the world on a conference call at midnight waiting to see if some software upgrade is going to fail. It usually does and that means nobody sleeps for a few days.😲

This is a cut and paste from a document I received this morning, and it is far from the worst:
"We are sharpening our policy prescriptions, increasing our visibility, responding quickly to events, better highlighting our expertise on the horizontal issues crosscutting our work, and better communicating our impact."

🤦

Our former PM talked about "programmatic specificity"

When the sproggle shaft fails to interact diametrically with the dooflunker, it may cause retrograde or diminished oscillation of the thrombobulator.

I'm the FD of a largish, completely un-PC engineering company. We don't go in for corporate speak at all but we once employed a Business Development Manager who used to carry a book on management with him wherever he went, very strange. Anyway in his first management meeting he came out with some absolute rubbish to which the response by my MD was along the lines of "talk crap to me again and I'll f🤬cking head butt you". Suffice to say he didn't last long in the business.

'Notionally'

I worked with this individual who used this word all the time, worse yet, his co-worker who knew nothing used it as well to make herself feel more important.

To this day, I have no idea what it means...

Budget stewardship

Also, in the commercial power industry, I have heard corporate PR types refer to a transformer explosion as a "reconfiguration event".
ex. "The transformer didn't explode, it underwent a reconfiguration event."

Do you have an example of context? In finance and HR we use it a lot but it has a specific, technical meaning describing how certain retirement plans are funded. An employee's earned or accrued pension plan is a "notional" account or value attributed to them until they actually commence benefit payments. Until then, the benefit is not in that person's name and is an asset owned by the plan. A 401k is always in the persons' account and is an asset in their name, even though the funds are co-mingled.

I've also heard of power theft referred to as "non-technical losses" (i.e. when people illegally tap into a pole-top transformer or distribution feeder or connection line).

Now, with some poetic license, a slight thread pivot for your enjoyment: some winners/notable/dishonorable mentions culled from the archives of the "Ignobel Prize" and "Bullwer-Lytton Prize" (like Razzies awards, but for Academia and Literature, respectively). Enjoy and have a great weekend, everyone.
A. Some Ignobel Prize Winners (re: goofy scientific research):
· PHYSICS PRIZE: "Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String," Dorian M. Raymer and Douglas E. Smith, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 42, October 16, 2007, pp. 16432-7.
Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, USA, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.
· MEDICINE PRIZE: "Inhibitory Spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains," Mirjam A. Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop, Psychological Science, vol. 22, no. 5, May 2011, pp. 627-633.

· MEDICINE PRIZE: "The Effect of Acute Increase in Urge to Void on Cognitive Function in Healthy Adults," Matthew S. Lewis, Peter J. Snyder, Robert H. Pietrzak, David Darby, Robert A. Feldman, Paul T. Maruff, Neurology and Urodynamics, vol. 30, no. 1, January 2011, pp. 183-7.
Mirjam Tuk (of THE NETHERLANDS and the UK), Debra Trampe (of THE NETHERLANDS) and Luk Warlop (of BELGIUM). and jointly to Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman (of the USA), Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff (of AUSTRALIA) for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things - but worse decisions about other kinds of things‚ when they have a strong urge to urinate.

· CHEMISTRY PRIZE: US patent application 2010/0308995 A1. Filing date: Feb 5, 2009.
Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami of JAPAN, for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm.
· PHYSIOLOGY PRIZE: 'No Evidence Of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise Geochelone carbonaria," Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandl, Ludwig Huber, Current Zoology, vol. 57, no. 4, 2011. pp. 477-84.
Anna Wilkinson (of the UK), Natalie Sebanz (of THE NETHERLANDS, HUNGARY, and AUSTRIA), Isabella Mandl (of AUSTRIA) and Ludwig Huber (of AUSTRIA) for their study "No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise."


· LITERATURE PRIZE: "How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done," John Perry, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 23, 1996. Later republished elsewhere under the title "Structured Procrastination."
John Perry of Stanford University, USA, for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important.


· PUBLIC SAFETY PRIZE: "The Attentional Demand of Automobile Driving," John W. Senders, et al., Highway Research Record, vol. 195, 1967, pp. 15-33. VIDEO

John Senders of the University of Toronto, CANADA, for conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him.
B. Some Bullwer-Lytton Prize Winners (re: bad fiction writing):
· The grisly scene before him was like nothing Detective Smith had ever seen before, but there were millions and millions of things he had never seen before, and he couldn't help but wonder which of them it was.
Sean Griffin; Tacoma, WA

· Her flaming red hair whipped in the wind like a campfire, stroking the embers of passion hidden within the hearth of my heart and I began to burn with a desire that seared me to my very core - oh the things that I would do if only I weren’t incarcerated for arson!
Aubrey Johnson; Edmonton, AB, Canada

· As I stood among the ransacked ruin that had been my home, surveying the aftermath of the senseless horrors and atrocities that had been perpetrated on my family and everything I hold dear, I swore to myself that no matter where I had to go, no matter what I had to do or endure, I would find the man who did this . . . and when I did, when I did, oh, there would be words.
Rodney Reed; Ooltewah, TN

· From the limbs of ancient live oaks moccasins hung like fat black sausages -- which are sometimes called boudin noir, black pudding or blood pudding, though why anyone would refer to a sausage as pudding is hard to understand and it is even more difficult to divine why a person would knowingly eat something made from dried blood in the first place -- but be that as it may, our tale is of voodoo and foul murder, not disgusting food.
Jack Barry; Shelby, NC

· The Los Angeles morning was heavy with smog, the word being a portmanteau of smoke and fog, though in LA the pollutants are typically vehicular emissions as opposed to actual smoke and fog, unlike 19th-century London where the smoke from countless small coal fires often combined with fog off the Thames to produce true smog, though back then they were not clever enough to call it that.
Jack Barry; Shelby, NC


· Convinced that the fabled Lost Treasure of Eggsbury was concealed within the statue of the beloved Sister Mary Francis in the village square, Professor Smithee would steal away in the darkest hour of each night to try to silently chip away at her impervious granite vestments - a vain and fruitless nightly exercise, he well knew, but it was a hard habit to break.
Rodney Reed; Ooltewah, TN

We recently stopped using "silos" or verticals" and have replaced them with "glidepaths" and "swim lanes".

Not sure this qualifies as "Corporate Speak" but-
I had a summer job for a couple of years-worked for a local fence company
installing chain link and wooden fences
The yard boss would create a list of parts we needed for each job and we would load them on the truck
One day we arrived at the job site and found that a fence part loaded on our truck was 1/2"
instead of the correct 3/8"
We called the yard boss asking if we should drive back and pick up the correct part so we could finish the install
His answer was simple and concise, but straight to the point
"if it don't fit, make it fit"
So we did
I have used that saying many times in my teaching and coaching career-
only in jest, by the way

Laughing my ass off!

I love it! I can hear the accent in my head.

Most people who aren't native North American English speakers have a very hard time with slang. We call it "slangling" - a combination of then words slang and mangling. Even though she came from the Philippines when she was around 8 or 10, my wife still butchers some phrases resulting in hysterical laughter from me and anyone else within earshot.

I left the corporate organized business world 25 years ago. Too many migraines caused by higher managers requesting reports and summations of work that were never looked at, just put in a file. You know the type. Walking around with a stick up their butt and contribute nothing to the running or profitability of the company except for the high usage of paper. After I left that world and started my own, I quickly arrived at my personal management style. In short I call it 3D. Do it, dump it or delegate it. Since there is usually only me in the work force it is a 2D management. Business answers take no longer than 30 seconds. Reports, what reports. Migraines? Not one in 25 years. I have one person to answer to and she has been my partner for 41 years. However, sometimes she is not silent!