Discoveries

Office-Speak: The Win-Win Guide to Touching Base, Getting the Ball Rolling, and Thinking Inside the Box

D.W. Martin

Simon Spotlight Entertainment: 176 pp., $12.95 paper

“Office-SPEAK” is your guide to the buzzwords and empty language that will, the author promises, assure your rise up the corporate ladder. Martin advises his readers to make up verbs, as in “I memoed the memo”; to repeat words, since redundancy makes you “seem more conscientious”; never to tell the truth in a job interview (the list of whoppers he has heard is worth the price of the book); to use physical aggressiveness to convince interviewers of your conviction and passion; to “get noticed” (ladies should wear low-cut blouses and miniskirts whenever possible); and to interrupt frequently with such adjurations as “In English, please!” (“Oh, the irony,” he chortles. “[B]y being the first one to point out the need to cut through all that corporate BS and get right to the crux of the matter, you make it almost impossible for anyone to call you on your own meaningless chatter.”) There’s a section on key phrases for diverting responsibility, and a list of horrors involving furniture imagery: “frame the argument,” “couch it in these terms” and “can you chair the next meeting,” to name just a few of them. The very absurdity is comforting.

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Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter’s Guide

Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway & Jon Warshawsky

The Free Press: 192 pp., $22

The authors of this extremely funny book on the current lamentable state of business lingo note that it presents us all with a “huge opportunity to become more persuasive. To be that one infectious human voice -- the one that’s authentic and original and makes people want to listen.” It’s not enough to eliminate meaningless words such as “synergy” and “paradigm”; one must also avoid four major traps: the obscurity trap (fear of concrete language, of taking responsibility for what you say); the anonymity trap (the temptation to be a clone); the hard-sell trap (the tendency to “overpromise,” accentuating the positive and ignoring the negative); and the tedium trap (the temptation to generalize, leaching all personality from one’s writing and speech).

“Why Business People Speak Like Idiots” contains several compelling suggestions: “Take Your Personality to Work” days, the dangers (and overwhelming inhumanness) of PowerPoint, the importance of using “that quaint little device” the telephone. There’s a wonderful epigraph from John Updike: “A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience” and a valuable chart that shows “Pronouns Behaving Badly.” (“Unless you just swam the English Channel with no help, after years of training by yourself and living alone, after your parents forbade you to do it and told you that you would definitely fail, find a way to use ‘we.’ ”)

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Death Sentences:

How Cliches, Weasel Words, and Management-Speak are Strangling Public Language

Don Watson

Gotham Books: 208 pp., $20

Don WATSON is angry, not amused, by the perversion of public language, particularly in universities, libraries and art galleries, and even among kindergarten teachers. He is furious that language is employed to “neutralize expression” (something that George Orwell called “anesthetic language”), and he captures the powerlessness and frustration we feel when confronted by meaningless words delivered with authority.

Consultants, he writes, “are the plague rats of the language virus.” Corporate tools (like PowerPoint, whose bullets give the illusion of fact) and political language (which frequently causes “a fight [to break out] between our need to believe and our instinct to distrust”) make Watson especially angry. In the end, a reader may find it hard to sustain Watson’s level of indignation. Language can be dangerous, even toxic, but the human beings uttering it are so darn funny, so lemming-like, so pathetic!