It’s Not Fair To Blame Everybody For The Amount Of Crap That Plugs Our Inboxes
It’s not fair to blame everybody for the amount of crap that plugs up our inboxes. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a few people ruin it for the rest of us. This table of jargon that I compiled from 2009 press releases demonstrates it:
What’s can it mean? Read across the row. There’s a 3.7 per cent chance that a press release will use robust. But, if it also describes something as next generation, it is three times as likely (10 per cent) it will chuck in robust as well. And if it describes something as next generation and flexible, now there’s a 17 per cent chance you will find robust in there as well.
In short, the more jargon you use, the more you’re likely to use.
We get to the silly situation where, having described the product or service – or, I’m willing to wager, the solution – as next generation, flexible, robust, world class and scalable, more than a quarter of press releases chuck in easy to use as well.
I have three explanations why the press releases might need to call on “easy to use” in this situation:
1. It’s really important for sales: the company thinks that something which is next generation, flexible, robust, world class and scalable might sell badly because we worry that we won’t find the on switch.
2. Ease of use is not an obvious feature: if you can’t even write a press release that ordinary people can understand, it’s unlikely we will believe you can make a product that ordinary people can use.
3. Once I watched a TV report on how they used to typeset Mao-era Chinese communist newspapers. Because the Mandarin alphabet has a basic vocabulary of more than 3,000 characters it was easier for the typesetters to keep entire ready-made Cultural Revolution jargon phrases at hand, like the one at the top of the page, and just assemble the daily paper from the revolutionary brainwashing twaddle kit with a few names thrown in.
When we close our minds we tend to rely on empty, grandiose phrases to please authority. Of course in the West we’d never do anything like that, because here we are free to choose which words we use. Apparently.
Tim Philips
Tim has been a freelance journalist since 1990, writing about business, technology, social change and innovation. He has written for the Wall Street Journal Europe, The International Herald Tribune, The Times and Sunday Times, The Observer, The Telegraph, The Independent and The Daily Express among others. For two years he was a technology and internet columnist for the Guardian. The business magazines he has written regularly for include Director, Management Today and Business 2.0. He is a frequent guest on BBC television and radio and Sky News and a regular conference speaker. Tim is also the author of Scoring Points: How Tesco is Winning Customer Loyalty (2004); Knockoff: the Deadly Trade in Counterfeit Goods (2006) and Not One of Us: the Trial the Changed Policing in Britain for Ever (2007). Not One of Us was Radio 4 Book of the Week and is currently being made into a television drama. He is also the author of guides to Machiavelli and Bertrand Russell, among others. Tim is currently writing Fit To Bust, an anthology of business failures, which is becoming a bigger book every day. And don’t forget his blog, Talk Normal.
Tim has been a freelance journalist since 1990, writing about business, technology, social change and innovation. He has written for the Wall Street Journal Europe, The International Herald Tribune, The Times and Sunday Times, The Observer, The Telegraph, The Independent and The Daily Express among others. For two years he was a technology and internet columnist for the Guardian. The business magazines he has written regularly for include Director, Management Today and Business 2.0. He is a frequent guest on BBC television and radio and Sky News and a regular conference speaker. Tim is also the author of Scoring Points: How Tesco is Winning Customer Loyalty (2004); Knockoff: the Deadly Trade in Counterfeit Goods (2006) and Not One of Us: the Trial the Changed Policing in Britain for Ever (2007). Not One of Us was Radio 4 Book of the Week and is currently being made into a television drama. He is also the author of guides to Machiavelli and Bertrand Russell, among others. Tim is currently writing Fit To Bust, an anthology of business failures, which is becoming a bigger book every day. And don’t forget his blog, Talk Normal. ...less info
