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Hot New Jargon Buster
Many introverts are word lovers. And word lovers hate seeing language butchered. Of course, none of us butcher it ourselves. Right? It’s always someone in the next cubicle. In case you have any doubts the next time you draft an award worthy memo, enter a word you suspect could be jargon into a fun and useful new tool, UNSUCKIT—and presto, out comes the term in plain English. I put UNSUCKIT through the paces for a few of my pet peeves:
Calendarize unsucked = Schedule
Ideate unsucked = Think
Impactful unsucked = Significant
Leverage unsucked = Take advantage of, use, or act upon
So get off your low hanging fruit and go for a quick and dirty win-win—or check out UNSUCKIT ASAP. Hat tip to entrepreneurial evangelist Guy Kawasaki for spreading the word about UNSUCKIT on his blog, where I first stumbled upon it.
Copyright © 2010 Nancy Ancowitz
- Tags: Guy Kawasaki, UNSUCKIT, introverts, jargon, plain English, word lovers
August 30th, 2010 at 12:33 pm
Ooo, I'm guilty of "leverage" – and it's funny, b/c it really IS low hanging fruit. 🙂 It's the first thing that came to me and it stuck. Oy! Back to the drawing board (ha!). This is a great tool… thanks for sharing, Nancy (and Guy!).
September 1st, 2010 at 2:40 pm
Thank you, Beth! Yes, but I think “leverage,” along with words like “utilize,” is only a parking violation in the world of jargon. We get into moving violation territory with words like “contextualize,” ‘brandactional,” and “disambiguate.”
I noticed that some of these terms sounded fresh a long time ago (e.g., “cradle-to-grave”), but now they’re stale as last week’s bread.
September 2nd, 2010 at 8:25 pm
Sounds like a lot of fun. Is it really useful? I'm afraid I'd spend so much time playing with it that I wouldn't get any work done. On the other hand, d'ya suppose it would work on the tax code?
September 2nd, 2010 at 9:54 pm
Yes, it’s fun for word lovers. Also a glorious time suck when you could be, er, twittering. Brilliant idea about the tax code. Hey, you could get incentivized with actionable monetary rewards!
September 6th, 2010 at 8:25 pm
Nancy, if it's only a parking violation, I'll live with that 🙂 (because I'm familiar with it, LOL!). My favorite one was "calendarize" – that one should carry a life sentence. I once had a coworker who would say we needed to have a "confab," short for "confabulation." Unsuckit didn't recognize either term, but those are at least parking violations if I ever heard them.
September 7th, 2010 at 1:27 am
Beth,
That's an extreme category: words UNSUCKIT doesn't even recognize. Hey, I was surprised to see that "radar screen" was out of bounds too. Not that I've never used that term. Nah. "Off the charts" isn't there either. These may be okay if we use them only once in awhile.
N