Bullshit BIngo #5 - Cover Off

I’d forgotten about this one because, mercifully, people don’t seem to use it any more. But I just got it again, in an email. I first heard it six or seven years ago and it stopped me in my tracks like a terrible smell. It just sounds wrong. How can you cover something off? It doesn’t make sense.

It’s a pointless addition. “Is there anything you’d like to cover off on the call?” someone says. Why not just say: “Is there anything you’d like to cover on the call?” The second option has the twin benefits of greater economy and actual meaning.

I don’t know where these stupid things come from. But I suspect that some people sit around for ages thinking them up deliberately, like Oscar Wilde used to do. Except that Oscar Wilde was a master of wit and these people are just trying to make themselves look slicker or more intelligent by squeezing out meaningless drivel like ‘cover off’.

They’re probably the kind of people that employ the ‘self’ suffix all the time because they think it makes them sound more professional.

“And will it just be yourself attending, sir?”
“Just address it to myself, if you would.”
“Excellent, myself will see yourself at 2pm, then. I may invite a couple of other selves to the meeting so we can get a broader perspective.”

Cretins.

So, please bear this in mind: You can tick off, mark off, set off, let off, run off, sound off and round off. You can skive off, drive off, kick off, tip off, rip off, sack off and jack off. You can spin off, slink off, hand off, stand off, get off, fend off and send off. Most importantly, you can just fuck off.

But you CANNOT cover off.

You just can’t.

Bullshit Bingo #4 - Incentivize

Incentive is such a nice word, not only does it sound quite nice, it has a nice meaning.

Mmmmm, an incentive.

I love a good incentive me.

I’d do practically anything for a nice juicy incentive.

Which makes its recent bastardization all the worse. You’d be hard pressed to find a nastier example of Americanized business speak verbificationalization.

A perfectly acceptable alternative to incentivize, and far nicer, would be motivate.

Bullshit Bingo #3 - Utilize

The above word is utilized often in tech PR press release land. Once upon a time utilize used to be a useful word. It used to describe the action of using something for a purpose for which it hadn’t been designed. Like utilizing press releases to wipe your arse, for example.

These days, however, utilize just means use.

So while in most cases utilized is not technically being utilized incorrectly, it is still a bullshit bingo word utilized to make the writer look like proper IT person. People think this because it contains more syllables than use so must be more sophisticated and since it also contains a zed it must be more technologically advanced than use.

All it ends up doing is making the writer look like the sort of person who thinks it is cool to wear a mobile phone in a belt mounted hip holster.

Use the word use, it’s shorter and it means the same thing.

Bullshit Bingo #2 - Architect

My wife is an architect. That means she designs and oversees the construction of buildings. Real buildings. What she does not do is work in IT.

In order to call herself an architect she went to university for six years and then completed a further year's professional qualifications. What she did not do was go on a course for three days in Ruislip and come out with an ACME/Microsoft Access certificate.

So it is understandable that my wife gets annoyed when people in IT call themselves 'architects' or when hapless PRs refer to a communications system or a circuit board as an example of 'architecture'. What do they think this is? The fucking Matrix?

Stop calling IT workers architects. Stop calling circuit boards architecture and, most importantly, stop referring to any changes to a circuit board as 'architecting'. Then, hopefully, when my wife is a looking for a new job and searches under 'architects', she'll find some jobs she spent seven years qualifying for rather than some rubbish IT jobs with annual salaries significantly higher than both of us earn in two years.

Bullshit Bingo #1 – Agnostic

The word agnostic is often attached to a software or hardware product, or indeed an organisation, to mean that the software or hardware product, or organisation is open, that is (to use another bullshit bingo word) non-proprietary

For record, here’s the generally accepted definition of agnostic:

A person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience.

There is a word that will suffice, though. A word that was invented to convey the meaning people using agnostic in this context wish to convey. The word is: Neutral.

So don't use agnostic. You might as well use Mauve, or Gangly... or Twat.