The Scourge of Buzzwords - New English Review

by Kenneth Francis (September 2019)

Drop Soda (panel 3), François Anton, 2014

Every time I hear buzzwords on the radio, TV, or spot them in newsprint, I roll my eyes in despair and reach for my M2 flamethrower. Surely the ‘chattering classes’ can be more creative with their language? In fact, using such words tells us more about groupthink bondage than it does about their lack of creative writing. During the Irish boom of the early-noughties, the term ‘Celtic Tiger’ was used in financial reports like confetti at a wedding, if you’ll pardon the well-worn idiom. Thankfully, during subsequent booms it became less fashionable. It seems every era is guilty of irritating buzzwords. Here is a list of what I believe to be some common examples of annoying jargon, both in broadcast and print journalism.

Existential threat: It seems nearly everything now in the world where conflict lies is an existential threat, according to the ‘intelligentsia’. For the metaphorically challenged, the words conjure up an image of Jean Paul Sartre, dressed in black polo-neck sweater and wearing beret and sunglasses, about to mug Martin Heidegger, sitting in a Parisian café sipping coffee back in the mid-1950s. But for the luvvies of the ‘chattering classes’, it’s essential to use these words to remind listeners and readers that they are in tune with the linguistic zeitgeist. Just like the phrase ‘brutal murder’, such adjectives are tautological.

Kicking the can down the road: If ever a politician needed to be kicked down the road, it’s for using such a phrase that’s become hackneyed on a Himalayan scale. Why not avoid it and just used the plain word ‘avoid’?

Symbiotic: This used to be a term reserved for the fields of biology, from the Greek ‘living together’. Many biological organisms dependent on each other, or parasitic, are subject to symbiotic attachment. But the word made its way into the corporate sector, where almost every business relationship is symbiotic. One hardly thinks of the image of a Great White CEO running down the corridor naked with several staff members, like marine leeches, stuck to his body.

It’s not rocket science: The actress Emma Thompson recently said she is done with men who don’t know how to interact with women after the rise of the #MeToo movement. “Get a grip guys,” she said, “it’s not rocket science,” the Late Night star said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “You just behave with respect and courtesy.” Then, with a lack of respect and courtesy, she added: “Now shut up and get on with it.” I wonder what a rocket scientist would make of that?

Going forward: This irritating buzz cliché was at its peak during 2007/2008. During that time, I remember attending a meeting where an advertising manager said the following: “…And although we’ll be cautious by taking a step back, we’ll nonetheless keep on pressing forward, going forward.”

It’s a no-brainer: To say something is a no-brainer is to say it doesn’t need a brain to work out the issue at hand. Now, try doing that without your brain.

At the end of the day: There was a time during the late-1980s/early-’90s when a British soccer manager or player couldn’t string a sentence together on TV or radio without saying ‘…at the end of the day’. However, this annoying verbal Zimmer-frame tends to be exclusive to the UK. It would make a good title for a book on the history of British soccer.

Take a holistic approach: This conjures up an image of a hippy sitting in a New Age-decorated room surrounded by candles and burning oil scents. Why not just say, ‘let’s incorporate as much as possible’?

Brexit: A portmanteau of ‘British’ and ‘Exit’, it is arguably the most irritating, contemporary piece of jargon to both ‘Remainers’ and ‘Brexiteers’. For anyone who has just arrived back to earth from a Mars’ mission, it means Britain’s impending exit from the EU.

She goes on to say that in literature, excessive exclamation-mark use has always been considered a hallmark of bad writing, denoting, as it does, an excitable nature not easily reconciled with the desire to be taken seriously. But wasn’t James Joyce prone to overuse of this punctuation mark? In the words of Scott Fitzgerald: “Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes.”

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The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd (with Theodore Dalrymple).

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