Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter’s Guide (Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway, and Jon Warshawsky) is an entertaining look at why business people use language like “We harness deep industry, process and technology expertise and unrivaled large-scale, complex change capabilities” and what can be done about it.
The bad news is that, as translators at least, there isn’t much we can do about the “bull” that comes across our translation desks. We just have to make sense out of it and translate it. The good news is that understanding where the bull comes from will help us deal more effectively with the people behind it–our clients.
In their tirade against jargon, the authors propose a SCUBA (System to Clean Up Bogus Acronyms). They also recommend avoiding SGPs (Stupid Generic Photographs) as a way to add mass to our business newsletters without content, and often at no additional cost! Then there are the dreaded email subject line FW: Re: re: re: re: and the dangers of being “templatized” by PowerPoint.
One unique angle in this back-to-communication-basics book is insight into the psychological underpinnings of business-speak (primarily the forces that transform otherwise interesting people–on the weekends at least–into conformist business automatons as soon as they enter the workplace). But mainly, the Bullfighter’s Guide offers a funny, irreverent review of the communication basics all business people should know about by now.
