corporate jargon equals verbal play doh
At my own workplaces, the New Age–speak mingled recklessly with aviation metaphors ( holding pattern, the concept of discussing something at the 30,000-foot level), verbs and adjectives shoved into nounhood ( ask, win, fail, refresh, regroup, creative, sync, touchbase ), nouns shoved into verbhood ( whiteboard, bucket ), and a heap of nonwords that
... See moreMolly Young • Why do corporations speak the way they do?
These words, past their initial intrigue, offer us a looking glass into specific cultures. After all, for a culture to come up with a word, something must happen often enough. And for it not to exist in other cultures, it must not have passed that intangible threshold. This very concept means that with untranslatables, we very likely experiencing a... See more
Steph Smith • Gaining Perspective Through Untranslatable Words
"Portmanteau words are now a staple of the magazine competition, and amid the waste of failed invention, every so often one meets a need: smog, stagflation, chocoholic. I don't know how we ever did without 'metrosexual', coined by my friend Mark Simpson."
10 whimsical words coined by Lewis Carroll
Chosen carefully, words don’t just describe innovation; they enable it.
Courtney Hohne • The monkey, the tiger beetle and the language of innovation
This has turned communicators of all kinds – from fashion influencers to public health specialists – into Kremlinologists who obsessively analyze the behavior of social media algorithms in the hopes of learning how to please them and (more importantly) how to avoid their punishments.
Hence algospeak. Social media users have learned the hard way that... See more
Hence algospeak. Social media users have learned the hard way that... See more
Cory Doctorow • Pluralistic: 11 Apr 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
My generic career advice for young people is that if at all possible, you should aim to work on something that no one has a word for. Spend your energies where we don’t have a name for what you are doing, where it takes a while to explain to your mother what it is you do. When you are ahead of language, that means you are in a spot where it is mor
... See moreKevin Kelly • Interview: Kevin Kelly, Editor, Author, and Futurist
As marketers, we love portmanteaus because they often convey concepts in a unique way. “Advertorials” allow you to create advertising with editorial content to both educate your audience and sell your product. Or how about a “listicle?” Is it an article or a list? Who cares—it’s simply a new, fun way to consume content that makes it easy for reader
... See moreLMD Agency • I Love You So, Portmanteau!
Beyond their meaning, words also differ according to how easy they are to pronounce. People generally prefer not to think more than necessary, and they tend to prefer objects, people, products, and words that are simple to pronounce and understand. In 2006, my colleague Daniel Oppenheimer and I investigated the performance of hundreds of stocks imm
... See moreAdam Alter • The Power of Names
And yet it should be possible to gaze into this alphabet soup and divine patterns. Our attraction to certain words surely reflects an inner yearning. Computer metaphors appeal to us because they imply futurism and hyperefficiency, while the language of self-empowerment hides a deeper anxiety about our relationship to work — a sense that what we’re
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