The items that we now categorise as weasel words, wank language and corporate buzzwords weren’t always the indefensible, indecipherable brain-slop of desk-shackled keyboard tappers. Almost every single one began as a word or term that didn’t make you want to chainsaw it alive and throw its corpse into an abandoned quarry.
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I’m all for metaphors. If variety is the spice of life then metaphors are the smoked paprika of language. I…
Read MoreI’ll tell you what annoys me about the ‘inspirational’ memes and quotes that do the rounds on Facebook and LinkedIn? Well, their preposterous oversimplification of the human condition, obviously. But also their ubiquity.
Read More…What ensued was a kind of Stalinist purge, but instead of people vanishing, it was working time that was systematically liquidated or sent to the gulag. Hour by hour, the amount of time we had to do our jobs was slowly deleted, replaced by meetings.
Read MoreLinguists recently identified around 20 words still doing the rounds today that were being uttered as many as 15,000 years ago. They included ‘spit’, ‘worm’ and ‘mother’.
‘Learnings’, ’empowerment’ and ‘monetise’ weren’t on the list. But these are such sturdy, evocative and indispensible words that I have no doubt they’ll be around 15 millenia hence. This got me thinking about what words not yet in the dictionary THAT I hope will be getting verbally lobbed across offices and work sites thousands of years from now.
Read MoreThe first speaker of the day called himself an inspiration vocaliser and assured everyone present that the secret to work life happiness was getting your job title right. He then slid down from the stage on an inflatable ramp he called the Dream Realisation Embankment and began asking people to say their job titles into his “Psych-rophone”, which was just a giant peach-coloured microphone.
Read MoreEvery single word I write on these pages and in the pages of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald is true. If…
Read More‘‘Learnings’’ is like a two metre tall, English-speaking, double-wattled cassowary in post-apocalyptic leather body armour on a steam train singing Broadway musical numbers. Nobody knows what it is, how or why it got there — but, my word, do they love it.
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