Oscar Wilde once described the United States and England as two nations divided by a common language, and to that list you could of course add Ireland. As a Canadian-American living in Ireland, with a job that involves talking regularly to people in Britain, I've sometimes longed for a dictionary of Anglo-Hiberno-Ameri-English words and phrases.
Geekspeak is, until you learn the basic terminology, an even greater hurdle. But you persevere, you give up novels for late-night reads of software manuals and eventually, although no one else will sit next to you anymore at dinner parties, even a systems manager will become for you, at last, a human being with something to say.
However, one vile form of jargon deserves total annihilation: marketingspeak. This is surely the language spoken in Hell. Satan: "Frankly speaking, your risk management strategies clearly failed to seamlessly integrate with your value proposition vis-a-vis getting to Heaven, leaving you no wriggle room. I'm afraid your only tactical solution was a strategic withdrawal to an affiliate programme. Welcome to Hell."
It gets even more painful. If you cross marketingspeak with geekspeak - in other words, talk to many business managers of software/hardware/Web design companies - you will hear techno-trash sentences like this: "Using our cross-platform solution in the enterprise, impacts your value chain directly; we are truly platform-agnostic, which is a real business driver, and we facilitate integrational competences, intraoperability, and disintermediation to enable the unilateral development of your brand equity. Trust our leadership team to go to bat cost-effectively for you to help you ratchet up productivity and achieve your near-term and long-term goals."
Translation: we'll make your computer systems work together, which will help you be more productive.
If you are getting proposals from Web companies for your business website or intranet that use the dreaded V-words - value add, value proposition, value chain, vectors, virtual team, virtual enterprise - or similar hogwash (immersive, development needs, leverage, management-centric, knowledge management) tell them to take the thing back and translate it into English. It's pure laziness - often laziness disguising that they have no idea what ever what they intend to do for you - for Web companies to resort to jargon. People use such nonsense because they think it makes them sound like they know things you don't. Don't let them get away with it, and don't feel intimidated about calling their bluff.
People who do know things and are in the business of providing a service or selling a product should be able to explain that product or service and its benefits and costs to you in language anyone can understand.
In the meantime, if you want to have a good laugh, check out the Buzzword Bingo site (www.buzzword-bingo.com). Buzzword Bingo is bingo based on marketing jargon, played surreptitiously as you sit in dreary corporate meetings. You can print out playing cards from the website, which are made up of words and phrases likely to be uttered by marketing managers, corporate strategists, and marketing directors who read too many management motivational books.
Each square on the card has a word or phrase like "global metrics", "Total Quality Management (or TQM)", "penetration", "product driven", "delighting customers", "mind share", "bundle of goods", "impacted", "global rollout", "organic solution", "window of opportunity" and (my favourite) "trust".
You mark off the square if someone uses the term. Just remember not to shout "bingo" while the managing director is waffling - er, speaking.
Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie
