Excerpts from Junk English
2
Manipulative modifiers are words or prefixes used to make bad things
look good by transforming good things into bad. Equality, for example,
is modified into the term relative equality, which is inequality. Other
examples are similarly loathsome:
- adult literature = pornography
- chocolatey cookies = cookies with no
chocolate
- creation science = biblical myth
- disbeneficiaries = casualties, victims
- golden dollar = gold-colored
coin with no gold
- guided democracy = dictatorship
- information management = censorship
- limited sovereignty = no meaningful
control
- mass customization = mass production
- negative growth = decline, loss
- nonauthentic, nonfunctional, nongenuine
= fake, imitation
- nondisclosure = secrecy
- political education = brainwashing
- scientific palmistry = fortune-telling
- semipermanent = temporary
- suboptimal = bad
- thick shake = milk shake with no milk
- war normal = abnormal
PowerPoint
People. It is freakish to call paper fiber media,
or a plan a progress and action structure. Such language has to
be trained into
an adult, nurtured in surroundings barren of natural English, encouraged
by like-minded people. The product of such training is a PowerPoint Person.
PowerPoint
People gather in places such as regional business conferences
and motivational seminars. They often have advanced degrees in specialties
such as Behavior Finance Theory, Biomedical Reengineering, and Marketing
Process Management. Their jargon isn’t simply corporate or scholarly
abstraction, and it isn’t used for effect or camouflage. PowerPoint
People write and speak their smorgasbord of groovy lingo, computer
language, and hackneyed expressions because it has become natural to
them.
PowerPoint
People write sentences such as these:
Thus a more realistic assumption of a spatially varying cropping pattern
and an alternative definition of equity by giving priority for assured
water supply in the two seasons would have had better implementability.
We
are internalizing their methodology to build our own culture of innovation.
As
they value each other’s differences, open themselves to new
possibilities, practice Think Win-Win, and build trust, they reap the
benefits of synergizing.
There is not one book
that comes close to impacting and exciting me to the magnitude that
yours has. It has crystallized
my thinking about how
to move my business to the next level, transformed how I approach my
clients, and revolutionized how I leverage my most important assets --
my time, talents and money -- for maximum results.
Value is an established synonym
for the verb appreciate, although it can seem obsequious when so used:
We value your input. As a noun it has
for years been used by salespeople who want to persuade prospective customers
that a product too costly to be called a bargain is still worth its price.
This car is a real value.
Value has become a hopeless
abstraction, often combined with adjectives that are meant to amplify
its power but in fact
only make the waters
murkier: absolute value, overall value, real value, and so on. Value
implies something good, but that something is never clearly stated.
I
spend most of my time creating and delivering value.
This repurposeable,
leading edge thoughtware delivers results-driven value.
The mission of your business
is to provide a specific Customer Type with a steady stream of Unique
Value.
The newly sophisticated, but
still loss adverse, corporate type now accepts that in order to climb
up the value
chain and thus continually increase
customer value they must be willing to give up monopoly technologies
and focus on new value.
Value is also seen co-opted
in peculiar, often indefinite compounds such as value-added [better],
value-based [smart],
value driver [benefit],
value proposition [enticement], and value-driven [frugal].
The present
era, the Complexity Era, has a strong focus toward value-based leadership.
We don’t need any more vans coming off the ferries with
a month’s
supply of food staying only at campsites. We need value-added tourism.
Operationalizing
Value Based Management. Understand What Drives Value. Find Where Value
Is Created or Destroyed. Make Value the Criterion for
Decision-Making. Embed Value into Your Culture.
Value engineering, value
management, and value planning are all inefficient substitutes for
efficiency. In modern business jargon they are often
euphemisms for paying fewer people less money to do more work.
Values are subjective -- they are not synonymous with virtue or goodness.
Hitler had values. Al Qaeda has values.
Many people have a habit of
associating their values with a much larger group, which requires prefacing
values
to form, for example, traditional
values, Christian values, American values, family values, community
values, civic values, and human values.
Values often change with the
passage of time, which can prove awkward. Among the values once included
as American
were segregation, denying
women the vote, and the right to take land away from Native Americans.
Core American values can mean whatever anybody wants it to mean, but
it certainly does not refer to the above historical American values.
Americans
who revere our heritage of freedom and independence must have the courage
to defy 1990s political correctness and uphold core American
values.
The subjectivity of values
is also apparent in the business terms values-based and values-driven,
popular with management consultants,
who say that
the most efficient businesses are those in which everyone shares the
same values. Enron’s executives, for example, shared the same values.
Values-Based
Hiring allows an organization to determine whether someone is a cultural
fit by asking, "Do the values reflected in an individual’s
behavior match the desired behavior that is representative of the organization’s
values?"
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