Corporate Buzzwords That Make My Brain Itch
You know that moment when someone in a meeting says something like “circle back,” and your soul leaves your body for a minute? Yeah. Me too. Corporate buzzwords are the…
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You know that moment when someone in a meeting says something like “circle back,” and your soul leaves your body for a minute?
Yeah. Me too.
Corporate buzzwords are the adult version of nails on a chalkboard.
And thanks to social media, it turns out I'm not the only one whose B.S. alarm starts blaring when someone starts talking about “calibrating our holistic synergy to maximize unprecedented growth.”
WHAT?
Let’s just get this out of the way: “Circle back,” “bleeding edge,” and “collab” top my personal hit list.
Just say “follow up,” “new,” and “work together.” It’s not that hard, Janet.
You're not pitching a tech start-up to venture capitalists. You're scheduling a meeting about printer toner.
Anyway, here are some other buzzwords that people online say send them into immediate eye-roll territory:
- Calibrate – Someone in a school district said this was the 2024 Buzzword of Doom. If you hear it in a staff meeting, prepare for vague goals and 47 PowerPoints.
- Work family – Hard no. You are not my family. You are Steve from accounting and you microwaved fish yesterday.
- Team player – Translation: "You’re doing all the work while Cheryl updates her vision board."
- Integrated with AI – Okay but…is it? Or did someone just copy ChatGPT into a spreadsheet?
- Unprecedented – Let’s go back to precedented times. I miss precedented.
- “Quick question…” – It’s never quick. It’s a 14-part saga.
- Gaslighting – The most misused word of the decade. No, your manager asking you to be on time isn’t gaslighting.
- Bespoke and Artisanal – Stop trying to make your overpriced granola sound like it’s wearing a monocle.
- Seamless – It’s never seamless. There will be a Zoom. There will be a glitch.
Here’s a radical idea: just say what you mean. No buzzwords. No nonsense. Just words that make sense. Or we can “circle back” to this later.
