Thursday, February 7, 2013

BEST. COLUMN. EVER.  Gene Weingarten has some complaints about modern English usage, such as:
Before the Internet, obfuscatory language was mostly limited to the small world of the interoffice memo, where everyone conspired to be as vague and process-driven as possible — promising nothing concrete while sounding businesslike. Today, however, terms such as “optimize,” “prioritize,” “initiative,” “parameter,” “implement” and “effectuate” have become common parlance on the Web, used unabashedly in endlessly intriguing combinations. There are hundreds of instances of “prioritize the implementation of,” “implement the prioritization of,” “effectuate the implementation of,” etc. The expression “implementation of prioritized initiatives” alone appears on the Internet 2,100 times, more often than some of Pablo Neruda’s lesser-known love poems.

No comments:

Post a Comment