Communities, groups, and corporations all have their own jargon, terms, catch-phrases and other language variants. This is fine. But sometimes this lingual flexibility goes too far. Today, I give you 5 terms whose use should be brought to an end in conference rooms and board rooms across the country.
5.) Action item (n.) – Something you have to do because your boss told you to do it.
Boss: I’ve given Fred an action item to shine my shoes and make 83 photocopies of my daughter’s country club membership card.
Fred: Hmm, I’ll have to delay my usual sycophant chores today so I can complete these important Action Items.
“Action item” sounds like something you need for a quest in a nerdy role-playing game. It’s not even sexy sounding. You have a damn job or task or chore to do. Calling it an “action item” doesn’t make it (or you) more important.
*See also: Action Item…Professional Superhero
4.) Bleeding edge (n.) or Bleeding-edge (adj.) – 1. (n.) The forefront, at a point ahead of the competition; 2. (adj.) Used to describe an advanced technology or unique product.
A few years ago, the place to be was the cutting edge, or companies wanted to design and sell cutting-edge products. Now companies aren’t satisfied with simply cutting; now they want to bleed. This metaphor makes no sense. Edges don’t bleed unless they’ve been over-saturated with some liquid—like ink or blood. If you’re on the bleeding edge, it sounds like your Research & Development team is over-spending its budget and/or working outside the scope of its project plan.
3.) Guesstimate (n.) or (v.) – 1. (n.) A guess or an estimate. They’re the same damn thing; 2. (v.) The act of making a guess or an estimate.
If you consult a thesaurus, you’ll find that the words “guess” and “estimate” are, in fact, synonyms. There is no good reason to conflate these words into one. You’re not showing that you’re simultaneously using two techniques to reach your conjecture. You’re just proving that you’re a slave to office slang and made-up words. It’s cutesy and should not be used by any self-respecting adult (with the possible exception of 1st grade teachers).
2.) Impact on (v.) or Impactful (adj.) – 1. (v.) Used as a synonym for “affect”; e.g., How will Ted’s untimely death impact on the project team? 2. (adj.) To indicate something that has had a profound effect on something else; e.g., Ted’s untimely death was an impactful moment for our team.
Unless Ted died by falling from a great height onto his project team, it’s safe to say his death had no “impact on” them at all. Furthermore, his death was not “impactful” because “impactful” is not a word. Period. End of discussion. No matter how effective a particular speech, earnings report, or sermon may have been—maybe it was moving, powerful, awesome, or brilliant—it was never “impactful.”
1.) Utilize (v.) – To use.
Yeah, ok, so it’s a word. And if you want to be a pretentious jerk, utilize it to your heart’s content as you wax philosophical about your company’s bleeding-edge product that is, like, sooo impactful that you can’t even begin to guesstimate how many action items it will complete for you. “Use” is perfectly fine; and if you find “use” too pedestrian and lacking in gravitas, chances are that most people don’t listen to you anyway.
The 12 Angry Men Blog 
April 9, 2007 at 2:54 pm
We seem to be on an Orwellian kick—these words are all ones that good old Eric Arthur Blair would have slammed and he did plenty in his classic Politics and the English Language. “Impacted” is a variation on “impact” I find particularly obnoxious. Impacted is for wisdom teeth. You also missed a golden opportunity: “paradigm.” 🙂
April 9, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Last week I had an assigned task of reporting the productized action items that were likely to produce the largest impact on our customer channel and increase the utilization of our business unit ahead of the quarterly revenue goals achievement assessment.
It was like someone spilled their marketing department all over my engineering job.
April 10, 2007 at 9:25 am
Ah, yes, paradigm is a classic 🙂
I had a list of 10 at first, but it seemed excessive. Words not making the cut included: “task” (as a verb), “offline,” “value-added,” and “edification” (used in place of “education”). We had a (now fired) contracted project manager who always shared things with the project team for “our edification.” Drove me nuts; it’s like he thought he was cleverly combining “education” and “edu-mah-cation.” Sad. Just sad.
April 10, 2007 at 10:59 am
Well, edification is a perfectly respectable and venerable word. Of course, I would guess that few things in corporate America are really all that edifying…
But perhaps your former manager really was concered with your moral development and really did present stories designed to form your conscience…
I’m guessing not, however.
[In my book, “value-added” (and its evil verb sibling “add value”) are among the worst offenders, though. “Offline” is pretty bad, but to me it’s moderated by its unconscious implication that the world is really like the Matrix. Since that thought makes me happy, I both love and hate those who use “offline”.]
April 10, 2007 at 10:59 am
Really, this could be a continuing series: there are so many terrible examples.
April 10, 2007 at 11:46 am
Offline is one of the few I actually like, as it serves a very specific purpose, let me illustrate:
In a world without the word “offline” it would go something like this:
As you can see, offline is a pretty unique word that carries a lot of meaning.
April 10, 2007 at 1:11 pm
“Offline” isn’t too bad, for the reasons AM lists. There are other ways of saying it, of course, probably a bit more precisely with no neologisms, like “This is a side point. We’ll discuss it separately, after the meeting, so we make sure to get through the agenda.” This is longer, though. So as long as “offline” is well-understood to mean something, it’s fine.
Sadly, these buzzwords are often used to sound hip, but there’s really nothing hip about left handed smoke shifters, head light fluid, or most of the crap that goes on in meetings.
April 10, 2007 at 1:20 pm
I’ve heard “offline” used in two ways:
1) The context noted by AM; i.e., meaning outside of the current situation/meeting/whatever
2) The more egregious misuse is when someone says something to the effect of:
Boss: Say, Thaddeus, where did you get those specs for our competitor’s product?
Thaddeus: Oh, I downloaded them offline from their website.
One might as well say, “I got ‘X’ off the onlines!” In an increasingly online society, the use of “offline” in the latter example is antithetical to what the speaker/writer actually means.
April 10, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Guess and estimate are not the same thing. To make a ‘guess’ is a prediction or assumption based on insufficient information. Or ‘Guessing something correctly’ is to conject the proper result before hand without all the needed information.
‘Estimate’ is to calculate a quantity of value or cost based on what is or appears to be all the available information using prior experience.
Combining the two means that one is making a judgement with incomplete information, but some backing of prior experience on the situation.
Or to say it plainly it is reasoning that uses both a ‘guess’ and an ‘estimate’.
April 10, 2007 at 1:34 pm
AFL said:
To make a ‘guess’ is a prediction or assumption based on insufficient information…Combining the two means that one is making a judgement with incomplete information…
So what’s the difference between “insufficient” and “incomplete” information?
🙂
April 10, 2007 at 2:08 pm
The addition of prior experience relating to the current situation being predicted. In other words when you say ‘guesstimate’ you are relating that the conjecture involves some of the blindness associated with a guess and some experience associated with an estimate.
One can not make an ‘estimate’ unless one has all known and relevant available data on hand.
April 10, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Nuance be damned, I still don’t like the word 😛
April 10, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Angry Cascadian Says:
>>Nuance be damned, I still don’t like the word 😛
April 10, 2007 at 4:11 pm
Damn quoting. “Guesstimate” sounds silly to me. As to the distinction between guess and estimate, in my business, “estimate” has a specific technical meaning, but in ordinary language, it seems quite a bit muddier, with many competing sub-definitions:
guess
1. to arrive at or commit oneself to an opinion about (something) without having sufficient evidence to support the opinion fully: to guess a person’s weight.
2. to estimate or conjecture about correctly: to guess what a word means.
3. to think, believe, or suppose: I guess I can get there in time.
–verb (used without object)
4. to form an estimate or conjecture (often fol. by at or about): We guessed at the weight of the package.
5. to estimate or conjecture correctly.
–noun
6. an opinion that one reaches or to which one commits oneself on the basis of probability alone or in the absence of any evidence whatever.
7. the act of forming such an opinion: to take a guess at someone’s weight.
es·ti·mate
1. to form an approximate judgment or opinion regarding the worth, amount, size, weight, etc., of; calculate approximately: to estimate the cost of a college education.
2. to form an opinion of; judge.
–verb (used without object)
3. to make an estimate.
–noun
4. an approximate judgment or calculation, as of the value, amount, time, size, or weight of something.
5. a judgment or opinion, as of the qualities of a person or thing.
6. a statement of the approximate charge for work to be done, submitted by a person or business firm ready to undertake the work.