Posted on 05/04/2023 5:30:16 PM PDT by DoodleBob
I think the list is humorous, but I would like to see the shorthand this person who wrote it uses to convey concepts.
Because that is mostly what these are used for: shorthand.
People may not like it, but when someone says “Go for the low hanging fruit”, does not every thinking person know pretty well just exactly what that means?
It means “Address the aspects of this issue that are both easy to address and provide a meaningful benefit to solve the issue at hand.” It doesn’t mean if you have a hundred things affected, and you can do quick work to take five or ten off the list (not quick work to take one or two off the list) then you do that. then you only have 95 or 90 items affected with little effort. You find a few of those, and pretty soon, instead of 100 items affected, you may have only 60. Or, if you like the 80/20 rule, you may have 20 items needing hard work to solve.
The author of the article sneers at “low hanging fruit” but every person in nearly every endeavor I have encountered understands just exactly what that means without having a big, breathy, self-absorbed sentence.
I like the humor in disparaging them, but nearly all of these when used appropriately are useful. They are code that everyone understands.
So, when someone uses “800 pound gorilla”, everyone with a brain knows exactly the context rather than “The biggest entity in the industry who sets the standards whether we like them or not”.
There is a parallel with the famous “Brevity is the soul of wit” which might be accurately phrased to say “Brevity is the soul of communication”, as long as the necessary level of detail in the communication is adequately conveyed..
If a concept can be conveyed effectively with a single word or catchphrase, why use a paragraph to convey the same thing?
Note: This exception to the criticism explicitly excludes people who can ONLY communicate with these phrases and uses them to hide their ignorance or sound engaged. Like poor Dilbert’s Pointy-Haired Boss. And that is why people identify with the disparagement of The Pointy-Haired Boss. We all know who those people are who can only communicate using phrases like that.
I would say that, a rule of thumb is that if someone uses more than one or two of these in conveying an idea, they are indeed suspect, because these “overused” catchphrases are just that without the adequate scaffolding of real information built around them.
I like that one, simply because in the miltary context it conveys a complicated premise using silly imagery!
Joseph Heller would no doubt have appreciated that one.
Hahahaha! Ain’t that the truth.
The last three years before I retired my employer managed to have dozens of meetings.
Not one covered anything of importance for my job.
At that point I was working at home so I would log into the meeting, put it on mute, use the handicapped text feature and wait to see if there were any key words that merited my attention.
There never were!
Another one:
We have to eat our own dogfood.
Used in my area of IT (networking) meaning we test something, roll it out on a limited area/basis to ourselves, and if it’s too much trouble, or confusing to us, or a royal PITA, then we scrap it and don’t force it on the masses.
Another one:
Forced march at dawn.
We roll something out gradually, rather than a sudden campus wide change for everyone.
Another one:
See how the sausage gets made.
No one wants to know HOW it works, just MAKE it work.
/personally, I like all of those, but HATE “proactive”. It’s usually used as opposite of reactive, but ‘pro’ in that context is meaning “before”, so it’s before you’re active. Of course it is.
I like it.
And also an a hole.
Btw, I really hate,”Do you have the bandwidth for...”
Only 50?
“Share with you” is one of my most un-favorite phrases.
As in “Let me share with you the results of [whatever].”
Does that mean the speaker gets half the results and I get the other half? Or each person at the meeting gets only a fraction of them?
Why not simply say “Here are the results...”?
We need to do a deep dive
Bring your A-game
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