Synergy: As in: “We must mobilise our synergies in this program”, or, “I haven’t the faintest idea what this is about – how about you?”
World class: We believe that someone outside our village may have heard of us.
I have found that synergy means to muddle everything up. Deliberately , as if “Getting your ducks in a row” doesn’t matter.
As for “World class” I’m reminded of the “World beating” Track and Trace” system. I guess that would be a little different but it cost £29.3billion (not millions) and achieved sweet FA apart from putting millions in the pockets of various companies and their shareholders. I worked for one of the IT managers in a later job and she was proud of it!
The grotesque reversal of: "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb."
I'm pleased to be the obnoxious douche who tells you you've got this wrong. "Blood is thicker than water" is a well-attested phrase. Your quoted saying has become popular (fuck you, reddit) but is apparently without historical basis.
Good engineering practice means that I like it done this way, but I can't find a standard, specification or procedure which is part of the contract that requires it.
Good engineering practice means that I like it done this way, but I can't find a standard, specification or procedure which is part of the contract that requires it.
I agree with that. "Best" implies that nobody can do better. Then we get into "continuous improvement", which though often reduced to a cliché, can actually mean something.
I think when 'best practice' has content, it means 'a suggested change in process that we are claiming is more effective than something else.' For example, if I say "we would like to suggest a new best practice to you," the implied worse practice is yours.
Perhaps it’s my lawyer background, but I usually hear “best practice” in a context where it basically means “it’s generally agreed that if you do it this way, you’ll have a good defense against claims of malpractice or liability on other grounds.”
I hate a lot of modern usage of verbs as nouns. “That’s a big ask.” Or nouns as verbs. “Let’s network.”
Oh yes. As at the Olympics, medal winners are "medalling".
OK, so some of them absolutely need to foil a plot by some kind of villain so that the villain can say… “I would’ve gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for those medalling kids.” 😁
When I read “Best practice” I wonder if it is the best that there is, or the best that the practitioners can be bothered with.
In IT, IME, it means "this is the recommended way, which you should follow unless you’ve got a really good reason to deviate from it".
I find it a useful content and see a lot of real or potential disasters caused by people ignoring it (or being ordered to go against it by management).
I don't have a problem the term 'best practice'. It's fairly clear that where there are a limited number of ways of doing a particular thing, one is better than the others.
My main gripe is not a word, per se, but a theme: the undefined acronym. If you wish to use an acronym, define it first and then you can go ahead and use it in the rest of your document/speech. One particularly bad example is that several of my colleagues refer to other colleagues by their initials in written communication. Might not be so bad if we didn't have two people with the initials ST in the same team, one of whom is a company director, the other being head of one of sub-teams.
World class: We believe that someone outside our village may have heard of us.
I think it's hilarious when I see something I've never heard of or something I'm sure is only locally known described as "world famous." The Original Tommy's World Famous Hamburgers chain in Los Angeles is my favorite.
The grotesque reversal of: "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb."
I'm pleased to be the obnoxious douche who tells you you've got this wrong. "Blood is thicker than water" is a well-attested phrase. Your quoted saying has become popular (fuck you, reddit) but is apparently without historical basis.
I don't have a problem the term 'best practice'. It's fairly clear that where there are a limited number of ways of doing a particular thing, one is better than the others.
My main gripe is not a word, per se, but a theme: the undefined acronym. If you wish to use an acronym, define it first and then you can go ahead and use it in the rest of your document/speech. One particularly bad example is that several of my colleagues refer to other colleagues by their initials in written communication. Might not be so bad if we didn't have two people with the initials ST in the same team, one of whom is a company director, the other being head of one of sub-teams.
But I always wonder where the line is drawn there. If someone on a Ship thread about, say, good-looking public-figures wrote "I think FDR was quite handsome", I personally wouldn't think they needed to write out "Franklin Delano Roosevelt". But even as closely related a figure as DDE, I might think required the full "Dwight D. Eisenhower".
Yeah. "FDR" and "Ike" might have equal recognizability as nicknames for their respective bearers, though one is an acronym, ie. the pet-peeve specified by @Sipech, and the other is a diminutive. But their basic obscurantist function is the same.
Synergy: As in: “We must mobilise our synergies in this program”, or, “I haven’t the faintest idea what this is about – how about you?”
This one actually means something but in plain English it is something like "my team don't have the resources to do our part and I suspect your team isn't adequately resourced either but if we work really well together we might pull it off" what the person saying it really means is "my team don't have the resources to do our part, can we use resources from your team".
In a pub or restaurant:
"Are you guys ready to order?"
"Yes please!"
"Perfect!"
"I'd like the Smoked Haddock fish cake"
"Perfect!"
"Any drinks?"
"A large Peroni"
"Perfect!"
"Anything else?"
"Some water for the table"
"Perfect!"
I hate a lot of modern usage of verbs as nouns. “That’s a big ask.” Or nouns as verbs. “Let’s network.”
Oh yes. As at the Olympics, medal winners are "medalling".
Ah, yes, “ Verbing”.
Here we contrive present participles by adding “ing” to a perfectly innocent noun.
As Calvin observed to Hobbes: “Verbing weirds language.”
But it’s a long-standing phenomenon in English; it’s been going on for centuries.
So Calvin spoke from beyond the grave then?
Hobbes was born in 1588. Calvin died in 1564.
Wrong Calvin, wrong Hobbes
Gold star to that man.
As well as the 'Gamaliel Should Do His Research Before Posting Award.'
Well done, sir!
Although the idea of yet another Calvin out there does give me the colly-wobbles ...
Confession is good for the soul so I will admit that I have no idea which other Calvin and which other Hobbes @Nick Tamen was referring to and stand to be enlightened in that regard.
I'm reminded of something Alan Bennett overheard in a Yorkshire bookshop, 'Is that Geoffrey Chaucer?'
Although both Calvin and Hobbes are certainly more common names than Chaucer.
I've come across Calvin as a first name but must admit the only instance of it as a surname I'm aware of is one Monsieur Calvin who lived in Geneva for a while.
Yeah. "FDR" and "Ike" might have equal recognizability as nicknames for their respective bearers, though one is an acronym, ie. the pet-peeve specified by @Sipech, and the other is a diminutive. But their basic obscurantist function is the same.
Some Brits would get the political reference Some wouldn’t.
Us Brits can be similar. We tend to use surnames for political figures with a couple of exceptions
Confession is good for the soul so I will admit that I have no idea which other Calvin and which other Hobbes Nick Tamen was referring to and stand to be enlightened in that regard.
I'm surprised - back in the nineties it seemed one couldn't walk past an office door without either a Calvin and Hobbes or a Dilbert comic strip on it.
If you type "Calvin a" into Google the auto complete will bring up Calvin and Hobbes.
Calvin is a small boy with a hyperactive imagination and selective precocity. Hobbes is his friend, a tiger, who looks like a stuffed toy to everyone else.
Confession is good for the soul so I will admit that I have no idea which other Calvin and which other Hobbes Nick Tamen was referring to and stand to be enlightened in that regard.
I'm surprised - back in the nineties it seemed one couldn't walk past an office door without either a Calvin and Hobbes or a Dilbert comic strip on it.
If you type "Calvin a" into Google the auto complete will bring up Calvin and Hobbes.
Calvin is a small boy with a hyperactive imagination and selective precocity. Hobbes is his friend, a tiger, who looks like a stuffed toy to everyone else.
As someone who enjoys a bit of scrambling I want to find the rock @Gamma Gamaliel has been hiding under for the past 30 years as it must be huge.
Yes, I recognise the Dilbert reference. Couldn't remember the Calvin and Hobbes names but recognised the characters when I googled them just now. Or 'now just' as we'd say in my native South Wales.
Don't mock. I've been a hermit in a cave on Mount Athos for the last 30 years ... 😉
In a pub or restaurant:
"Are you guys ready to order?"
"Yes please!"
"Perfect!"
"I'd like the Smoked Haddock fish cake"
"Perfect!"
"Any drinks?"
"A large Peroni"
"Perfect!"
"Anything else?"
"Some water for the table"
"Perfect!"
Had a similar experience in a pub only yesterday. Food was excellent, but the barmaid's response to everything was "perfect!"
People who start the answer to every question with ‘so’.
‘Lived experience’ - I am not aware there is any other sort.
I think a poster above mentioned people who say ‘I’m good’ rather than ‘I’m well’. Aaaargh!
And I remember confusing someone who was taking my details - it might have been the estate agent when we were moving - when I gave my name and they replied ‘amazing’, I said it wasn’t really, it was quite an ordinary name. Actually, it’s just struck me that perhaps they thought it was amazing I could remember my name at my advanced age….
The grotesque reversal of: "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb."
I'm pleased to be the obnoxious douche who tells you you've got this wrong. "Blood is thicker than water" is a well-attested phrase. Your quoted saying has become popular (fuck you, reddit) but is apparently without historical basis.
Like community is a unified, solid, close knit phenomenon.
You mean you think it's a clashing metaphor because a community is "unified, solid, and close knit", therefore you can't be "out in" it, but rather you're within it?
I think it might depend what the community is being contrasted with. It makes sense to me to say "I don't like staying home all day watching TV, I like to get out in the community", because the household is a smaller unit than the larger community.
When I hear people saying "Can I get a coffee" when they actually mean "Can you get me a coffee."
I always think "Go on then, help yourself. "
And don't get me started on "my/his/her truth" rather than "the truth."
Has nobody mentioned the automatic message "your call is really important to us", yet?
And anyone who keeps on pressing you to complete a satisfaction survey. Unless you've got a complaint, or want to give a special commendation for somebody who was extra helpful or went further than they needed, it should never be either necessary or useful.
I've never enjoyed being told "you're fine" after I've said "excuse me," or "pardon me."
Around here I feel like a lot of people say "excuse me" out of an abundance of caution when they're doing something innocuous like taking up space on the sidewalk while their dog sniffs something, and I say something like "oh no, it's fine" to acknowledge that they're paying attention to the fact that they're not the only person on the sidewalk but not doing anything they shouldn't be doing. (As opposed to the few who apparently think they own the whole sidewalk.)
I find there's a certain snobbishness and/or anti-innovationism with objections to interjections, tag words etc. People will chastise users of "like" for supposedly sounding like teenagers, but the chastisers themselves think it's perfectly okay to put "well..." in front of their statements, even though "well" adds about as much meaning to a statement as "like" does.
There is some usefulness to those words. I believe they're called "discourse markers" and "fillers." They actually do convey meaning (or perform other functions, like preventing the listener from thinking the speaker is finished, and speaking him/herself.
There is some usefulness to those words. I believe they're called "discourse markers" and "fillers." They actually do convey meaning (or perform other functions, like preventing the listener from thinking the speaker is finished, and speaking him/herself.
Right. I didn't mean there is no meaning at all to the words, just that, contrary to the people who condemn one while defending another, the amount of meaning is about the same between words.
Personally, I think "well" kinda qualifies the degree of certainty being conveyed, like the speaker is thinking about what he's gonna say before he says it, rather than claiming absolute certainty.
Comments
I have found that synergy means to muddle everything up. Deliberately , as if “Getting your ducks in a row” doesn’t matter.
As for “World class” I’m reminded of the “World beating” Track and Trace” system. I guess that would be a little different but it cost £29.3billion (not millions) and achieved sweet FA apart from putting millions in the pockets of various companies and their shareholders. I worked for one of the IT managers in a later job and she was proud of it!
I'm pleased to be the obnoxious douche who tells you you've got this wrong. "Blood is thicker than water" is a well-attested phrase. Your quoted saying has become popular (fuck you, reddit) but is apparently without historical basis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_is_thicker_than_water
I agree with that. "Best" implies that nobody can do better. Then we get into "continuous improvement", which though often reduced to a cliché, can actually mean something.
OK, so some of them absolutely need to foil a plot by some kind of villain so that the villain can say… “I would’ve gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for those medalling kids.” 😁
In IT, IME, it means "this is the recommended way, which you should follow unless you’ve got a really good reason to deviate from it".
I find it a useful content and see a lot of real or potential disasters caused by people ignoring it (or being ordered to go against it by management).
My main gripe is not a word, per se, but a theme: the undefined acronym. If you wish to use an acronym, define it first and then you can go ahead and use it in the rest of your document/speech. One particularly bad example is that several of my colleagues refer to other colleagues by their initials in written communication. Might not be so bad if we didn't have two people with the initials ST in the same team, one of whom is a company director, the other being head of one of sub-teams.
I think it's hilarious when I see something I've never heard of or something I'm sure is only locally known described as "world famous." The Original Tommy's World Famous Hamburgers chain in Los Angeles is my favorite.
I think you've won the thread.
But I always wonder where the line is drawn there. If someone on a Ship thread about, say, good-looking public-figures wrote "I think FDR was quite handsome", I personally wouldn't think they needed to write out "Franklin Delano Roosevelt". But even as closely related a figure as DDE, I might think required the full "Dwight D. Eisenhower".
Yeah. "FDR" and "Ike" might have equal recognizability as nicknames for their respective bearers, though one is an acronym, ie. the pet-peeve specified by @Sipech, and the other is a diminutive. But their basic obscurantist function is the same.
This one actually means something but in plain English it is something like "my team don't have the resources to do our part and I suspect your team isn't adequately resourced either but if we work really well together we might pull it off" what the person saying it really means is "my team don't have the resources to do our part, can we use resources from your team".
"Are you guys ready to order?"
"Yes please!"
"Perfect!"
"I'd like the Smoked Haddock fish cake"
"Perfect!"
"Any drinks?"
"A large Peroni"
"Perfect!"
"Anything else?"
"Some water for the table"
"Perfect!"
As well as the 'Gamaliel Should Do His Research Before Posting Award.'
Well done, sir!
Although the idea of yet another Calvin out there does give me the colly-wobbles ...
Confession is good for the soul so I will admit that I have no idea which other Calvin and which other Hobbes @Nick Tamen was referring to and stand to be enlightened in that regard.
I'm reminded of something Alan Bennett overheard in a Yorkshire bookshop, 'Is that Geoffrey Chaucer?'
Although both Calvin and Hobbes are certainly more common names than Chaucer.
I've come across Calvin as a first name but must admit the only instance of it as a surname I'm aware of is one Monsieur Calvin who lived in Geneva for a while.
Us Brits can be similar. We tend to use surnames for political figures with a couple of exceptions
“We’re drawing a line under it. Going forward we will…”
Meaning:
“We messed up but don’t expect an apology and let’s never mention it again.”
If you type "Calvin a" into Google the auto complete will bring up Calvin and Hobbes.
Calvin is a small boy with a hyperactive imagination and selective precocity. Hobbes is his friend, a tiger, who looks like a stuffed toy to everyone else.
Out in the community.
Like community is a unified, solid, close knit phenomenon.
I find this flow chart really helpful (Twix link):
https://x.com/AndrewBloch/status/635800266613354496
As someone who enjoys a bit of scrambling I want to find the rock @Gamma Gamaliel has been hiding under for the past 30 years as it must be huge.
😉
Yes, I recognise the Dilbert reference. Couldn't remember the Calvin and Hobbes names but recognised the characters when I googled them just now. Or 'now just' as we'd say in my native South Wales.
Don't mock. I've been a hermit in a cave on Mount Athos for the last 30 years ... 😉
Had a similar experience in a pub only yesterday. Food was excellent, but the barmaid's response to everything was "perfect!"
Another phrase that irritates me intensely, particularly when used by politicians or broadcasters is, 'Do you know what?'
Anita Anand uses it all the time when taking calls from people responding to BBC Radio 4's Any Questions.
Starmer's used it in political speeches too.
I seem to remember Sunak doing the same.
Whoever it is ... stop it!
‘Lived experience’ - I am not aware there is any other sort.
I think a poster above mentioned people who say ‘I’m good’ rather than ‘I’m well’. Aaaargh!
And I remember confusing someone who was taking my details - it might have been the estate agent when we were moving - when I gave my name and they replied ‘amazing’, I said it wasn’t really, it was quite an ordinary name. Actually, it’s just struck me that perhaps they thought it was amazing I could remember my name at my advanced age….
MMM
That's more down to usage rather than the phrase itself -- which derives from phenomenology.
Or for a less specialised audience, “That’s for Father Christmas / Santa to decide.”
MMM
You may also have done so whether you recognise this or not.
Well I'll be forked! Now I hate Albert Jack. And thank you for your helpful obnoxious douchery.
MMM
You mean you think it's a clashing metaphor because a community is "unified, solid, and close knit", therefore you can't be "out in" it, but rather you're within it?
I think it might depend what the community is being contrasted with. It makes sense to me to say "I don't like staying home all day watching TV, I like to get out in the community", because the household is a smaller unit than the larger community.
I always think "Go on then, help yourself. "
And don't get me started on "my/his/her truth" rather than "the truth."
And anyone who keeps on pressing you to complete a satisfaction survey. Unless you've got a complaint, or want to give a special commendation for somebody who was extra helpful or went further than they needed, it should never be either necessary or useful.
Not even necessarily formal. I have a friend whose Facebook posts include gems like "Myself and Frank went to the cinema ..."
I'm far too polite to ask if, had she gone alone, would she have written, "Myself went to the cinema" .
Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, uh, your opinion, man. Get over it.
I find there's a certain snobbishness and/or anti-innovationism with objections to interjections, tag words etc. People will chastise users of "like" for supposedly sounding like teenagers, but the chastisers themselves think it's perfectly okay to put "well..." in front of their statements, even though "well" adds about as much meaning to a statement as "like" does.
Right. I didn't mean there is no meaning at all to the words, just that, contrary to the people who condemn one while defending another, the amount of meaning is about the same between words.
Personally, I think "well" kinda qualifies the degree of certainty being conveyed, like the speaker is thinking about what he's gonna say before he says it, rather than claiming absolute certainty.
Another two words to add to the list.
😉