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Houston, we’ve had a probletunity, going forward

Management jargon and political gobbledegook exert a perverse pull on my attention, despite their often deadening inanity. At its best, this vacuous form of verbiage demands a dubious but undeniable...

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Words on a wire

We think of balance as a good thing, associating it with poise, equilibrium, evenness and harmony, as stability in unpredictable circumstances or as a healthy mix of disparate elements. It’s a...

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Reporting on sporting clichés and metaphors

Since my last report on activities at Macmillan Dictionary Blog, I’ve written several articles there about words and language. Time for a quick recap. March was the website’s month of sporting English....

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Critical learnings: a competition

There’s a competition that might interest you on Macmillan Dictionary Blog today. I’ve written a parody of corporate communication laced with buzzwords, management jargon, ridiculous metaphors and...

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Weasel words and skunked words

Time for a recap of my recent writing at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. Near the end of April, I took a look at “skunked” words. This is a term I came across first in Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern...

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Preloved euphemisms

. This ad in the local freesheet Galway Advertiser caught my eye. I was interested not in the reconditioned washing machine but in the reconditioned adjective that begins the ad. Preloved (or...

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Neologisms, jargon, pragmatics and cant

Macmillan Dictionary Blog recently asked guest writers to choose their favourite “online English” word. I couldn’t pick a favourite, so I cheated and wrote about hashtags. What struck me most, though,...

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Book review: Sick English, by Janet Byron Anderson

Specialist language sometimes spreads beyond its initial domain and becomes part of common currency. From baseball we get home run; from jousting, full tilt. And from medical science we get syndrome,...

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A reactive defence of ‘proactive’

What is it about proactive that people hate so much? Some object to it on the grounds of superfluity, arguing (incorrectly) that it does nothing active isn’t already doing, um, actively. Others revile...

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Book review: ‘Who Touched Base in My Thought Shower?’ by Steven Poole

Of all the varieties of English routinely criticised for degrading the language, one is deplored so routinely it’s practically an international pastime. Call it management speak, business jargon,...

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Transporting the dear departed euphemisms

[Trigger warning if you're grieving, or sensitive about death.] Death is often called the great leveller; it’s also the great euphemised. I have a book on euphemisms with a full chapter devoted to it,...

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Pompous language is a weapon

People have different motivations for using gobbledygook instead of plain language. They may wish to sound impressive and assume, incorrectly, that fancyisms trump familiar words. They may use it as a...

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Falconry terms in ‘H is for Hawk’

Revisiting T.H. White’s book The Goshawk last year brought back to me the peculiar lexicon of falconry: its austringer, keeper of goshawks; the creance used to leash hawks in training; and most...

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Unexplained jargon in fiction

I picked up this Richard Stark novel in a local second-hand bookstore and was attracted by the reviewers’ descriptions of its main character (click the photo to enlarge). Funny how repulsive can have a...

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Book review: Dent’s Modern Tribes, by Susie Dent

Jargon and slang get a bad press. In the right contexts, though, they serve an important communicative purpose, at the same time allowing users to express their identity as part of a community – and to...

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Cybersecurity Style Guide is a useful editing tool

Most people reading this will have partial or passive familiarity with some terminology from programming, information security, and related domains, but they may have just a hazy grasp of how they’re...

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Verb all the things

Lauren Beukes’s novel Broken Monsters has a short passage on business jargon and young people’s attitudes to it. Layla, a character in her mid-teens, is visiting her friend Cas and introduces Cas’s...

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Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction

Anyone who’s into both word lore and science fiction will have a fine time exploring the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. Call it cyberspacefaring.* Launched in early 2021, the HD/SF was once...

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