A lot of questionable language passes through a corporation each day, and I'm not talking about cussing, although thankfully there is plenty of that in some workplaces as well. And by the way, why do people think cussing is French? "This database is really shitty," you might hear someone say, followed by, "Pardon my French." What is French about that? When you WOULD want to say, "Pardon my French" would be, for example, when speaking to your boss who took Spanish in high school. For example, "Oh, yeah that project is late because il n'y a pas de documentation de requirements et je n'ai pas d'idee de ce que vous voulez. Pardon my French."
Anywho, the questionable language of which I speak will be made clear below. As I hold a degree in Corporate Linguistics from the U. of All People, I'm going to translate some corporate terms for those who are new to the corporate world, such as those who graduated in 2008 and just found a job.
| Corporate Word |
Real English Word |
| Solution |
Solve
(as in "The IT team is still trying to solution that problem.") |
| Solve |
Solution
(as in "The IT team plans to have a solve by end of business tomorrow.") |
| Incent |
Motivate
("We must incent our employees to come to work by looking hotter.") |
| Incentivize |
Really? |
| Calendar |
Schedule
("Have you calendared that meeting with HR yet?") |
| Concess |
Concede
("When are you going to concess that the customer was right?") |
| Profitability |
Profit
("We must incentivize our employees to focus on profitability.") |
And when I worked for a not-for-profit-but-might-accidentally-make-a-profit organization, I actually heard them use the word "ask" as a noun when speaking of asking a famous person for a donation. "I think we will need to get Sandra Bullock to do the Michelle Obama ask."
Since I know that we are all focused on continuous improvementation, I'm going to suggest some new corporate linguisticalities for the new year via the illustratorious paragraph below:
"When Marketing refused to provide accede to their strategiphoric data, the Sales team secessed from the company in order to provide more focusability on revenuing the products. Sales Managers began to carrot the sales force; for example, whoever calendared the most visits with buys was given an outdoor recede every afternoon for a week."
