The power of babble

Every profession has its own terminology or buzzwords. The military, for one, is famous for oxymorons such as "friendly fire" - which is probably not that amusing if you're on the receiving end. It also has an endless supply of acronyms and abbreviations, such as MREs. This stands for "Meals Ready to Eat," although a standard soldier's joke, apparently, is that it actually stands for "Meals Rejected by the Enemy."

The US Navy in particular - and this comes from Tom Clancy's riveting non-fiction work Carrier: A Guided Tour Of An Aircraft Carrier - has yet more elaborate acronyms, such as PATRONSPECPROJUNIT, which, as you correctly guessed, stands for "Patrol Squadron - Special Projects Unit". HELANTISUBRONLIGHT, meanwhile, is short for "Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron - Light."

Beloved argot

Politicians, too, have their own beloved argot, but as the object here is not to induce aneurysms or cardiac arrest, we won't touch on that, although it should be noted that the medical fraternity itself does a good line in arcane terminology.

In South Africa it seems particularly noticeable, where to give just a tiny and relatively innocent example, car salesmen are now almost universally called "new (or used) vehicle sales executives." Never mind that a decade or two ago, an executive was someone with a polished mahogany desk, a phalanx of overworked assistants, and a taste for five-star, three-hour lunches, expensive German cars and Johnny Walker Blue.

Meanwhile, in any organisation, it's almost impossible to find someone with a one-word job title. It's now hard to imagine an office junior settling for "clerk" instead of, say, "statistical collation officer - junior executive (mid-grade)" or some rot of the same sort that sees even call-centre operatives elevated to "customer service representatives." And, "All our customer service representatives are busy...your call is important to us" is not what you want to hear, as you sit on eternal hold, stifling the urge to repeatedly smash the phone into your PC screen.

Most annoying phrases

Indeed, eavesdrop on any corporate conversation these days, and you'll find it riddled with words and phrases such as "synergies," "face-time" (which essentially means a physical meeting), the insanely annoying "low-hanging fruit" (figure it out) and more. In fact, a US company, Accountemps, recently commissioned a study to find the most annoying corporate phrases, and its top five were:

• At the end of the day
  
• Solution
  
• Thinking outside the box
  
• Synergy
  
• Paradigm

But the American respondents were obviously sheltered from the worst excesses of corporate-gibberish, and the most ridiculous phrase of the lot didn't get a look in.

"Do you want to know what that is?" asks Greville Howard, founder of the Durban-based company Industrial Relations Specialists (IRS), which specialises in outsourcing, industrial relations, human resources and contract cleaning. "It's `leveling the playing fields'."

"At the end of the day," he smiles, "IRS staff are expressly banned from using it..."