Frank Lingua, president and CEO of Dissembling Associates, is the nation's leading purveyor of buzzwords, catch phrases and cliches for people too busy to speak plain English. Business Finance contributing editor Dan Danbom interviewed Lingua in his New York City office.
Danbom: Is being a cliche expert a full-time job?
Lingua: Bottom line is I have a full plate 24/7.
Danbom: Is it hard to keep up with the seemingly endless supply of clichés that spew from business?
Lingua: Some days, I don't have the bandwidth. It's like drinking from a fire hydrant.
Danbom: So it's difficult?
Lingua: Harder than nailing Jell-O to the wall.
Danbom: Where do most cliches come from?
Lingua: Stakeholders push the envelope until it's outside the box.
Danbom: How do you track them once they've been coined?
Lingua: It's like herding cats.
Danbom: Can you predict whether a phrase is going to become a cliche?
Lingua: Yes. I skate to where the puck's going to be. Because if you aren't the lead dog, you're not providing a customer-centric proactive solution.
Danbom: Give us a new buzzword that we'll be hearing ad nauseam.
Lingua: "Enronitis" could be a next-generation player.
Danbom: Do people understand your role as a cliche expert?
Lingua: No, they can't get their arms around that. But they aren't incented to.
Danbom: How do people know you're a cliche expert?
Lingua: I walk the walk and talk the talk.
Danbom: Did incomprehensibility come naturally to you?
Lingua: I wasn't wired that way, but it became mission-critical as I strategically focused on my go-forward plan.
Danbom: What did you do to develop this talent?
Lingua: It's not rocket science. It's not brain surgery. When you drill down to the granular level, it's just basic blocking and tackling.
Danbom: How do you know if you're successful in your work?
Lingua: At the end of the day, it's all about robust, world-class language solutions.
Danbom: How do you stay ahead of others in the buzzword industry?
Lingua: Net-net, my value proposition is based on maximizing synergies and being first to market with a leveraged, value-added deliverable. That's the opportunity space on a level playing field.
Danbom: Does everyone in business eventually devolve into the sort of mindless drivel you spout?
Lingua: If you walk like a duck and talk like a duck, you're a duck. They all drink the Kool-Aid.
Danbom: Do you read "Dilbert" in the newspaper?
Lingua: My knowledge base is deselective of fiber media.
Danbom: Does that mean "no"?
Lingua: Negative.
Danbom: DOES THAT MEAN "NO"?
Lingua: Let's take your issues offline.
Danbom: NO, WE ARE NOT GOING TO TAKE MY "ISSUES" OFFLINE.
Lingua: You have a result-driven mind-set that isn't a strategic fit with my game plan.
Danbom: I JUST WANT TO PUSH YOUR FACE IN!
Lingua: Your call is very important to me.
Danbom: How can you live with yourself?
Lingua: I eat my own dog food. My vision is to monetize scalable supply chains.
Danbom: When are you going to quit this?
Lingua: I may eventually exit the business to pursue other career opportunities.
It's been a best practice revisiting this quality driven, inside the box mindset. I'll need to tweak my knowledge base so as to empower my language with value-added, client focused words.
I can't get that 'ball park' taste out of my mouth...
when you frame the difference between buzzwords and clichés as hot and cold, you have failed to contextualize the real difference.
the speed of transactualization is increasing and old words are not a valid way to express our understand of the shifting paradigm.
new words are need to constuct the framework of reality, so that we can begin to move out our old logical constructs and into a dynamic changing, flexible workplace.
clichés are used to express whar are held to be truisms of the old frame work, but they ideas they express are a kind of nostalgia for a time and place that never really existed. in many ways, the virtual reality we are creating, is more real, simple because we know from the outset, it does not truly exist. virtual reality is easily manipulated, and infinitely upgradable, making it a value added format.
To me "buzzword" has a mostly negative connotation. It conjures up a self-important person, perhaps the assistant to a Somebody, who is talking down to me, and using language as a power tool in the most shameless manner imagineable.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,...
A cliche to me is an overused expression, sometimes expressing a truth, as in "You get what you pay for," or "It was raining like cats and dogs."
A cliche to me is an overused expression, sometimes expressing a truth, as in "You get what you pay for," or "It was raining like cats and dogs."Spot on my own definition of cliche, Alex. Interesting, though, cos I'd say just "It was raining cats and dogs". UK difference?
I reckon a "buzzword" is usually more of a
word than a
phrase: "multitasking", "leveraged", "joined-up", "hot-desk", etc. Buzzwords tend to have a more limited lifespan than cliches (and good thing, too
), although some worm their way into everyday speech, and even into dictionaries.
In reply to:
"It was raining cats and dogs
I guess that's really the expression used here too. (I really don't use it, hence the mistake.) I typically say "It was pouring rain," to distinguish a hard rain from a light drizzle.
thanks-- Dear Asp, i was being to think no one got it.
H o'T:
You are yet another person whom I will sue for damages to my keyboard caused by coffee spurting from the nares. That was absolutely wonderful.
I find it very interesting that in my present job as a lowly civil servant I am very much insulated from all of these base misconstructions of English. Here in my office we tend to communicate in real English, almost totally free of buzzwords such as have been bandied about in this thread. Many of these make me pause, translate, and shake my head in wonder.
TEd
24/7 With the Cliche Expert
By BEN YAGODA
Between 1935 and 1952, the humorist Frank Sullivan wrote a series of essays for The New Yorker in which Mr. Arbuthnot, the cliche expert, testified on the trite expressions and hackneyed phrases of the day. Almost 50 years have passed since his last appearance, so it is clearly time for Mr. Arbuthnot to make a return appearance.
Q: Mr. Arbuthnot, since your last testimony, have you continued to follow the world of cliches?
A: I'm all over it, 24/7.
Q: I beg your indulgence, but since it has been so long since you have made a public appearance, would you mind answering a few questions to establish your expertise?
A: Whassup with that? Sorry if I've got that deer-in-the-headlights look, but I'm shocked, shocked. Here's my deal: I'm a world-class talking head. I've made my bones and I've got all my bona fides. When you chatted me up about this, you didn't give me a heads up that I had to reinvent myself.
Q: Again, I apologize, but I am merely following the charter of this committee.
A: Whatever.
Q: All right. I shall give you a series of nouns, and you supply the adjective that Homerically must precede each one. Are you ready?
A: As I'll ever be.
Q: Competition is?
A: Fierce.
Q: And any success?
A: Unqualified.
Q: Agendas, endorsements, margins, bases, sources, the future, arguments, potential, waters, efforts, and breath?
A: Hidden, key, slim (or overwhelming), continuing, knowledgeable, foreseeable, heated, full, uncharted, Herculean, and bated. Bada bing! I may not be the flavor of the month, but I'm on a roll.
Q: You certainly are, and you will clearly be a valuable witness for our committee.
A: Sweet. And I'm sorry for going postal a minute ago. I promise I won't be high maintenance. With all the media here, I can see where this could be a win-win. Besides, I want to give something back.
Q: Let me start the questioning with this: Have you noticed any new cliches recently?
A: Big time. Bottom line: Arguably, this is the cliche's 15 minutes.
Q: Let's back up a minute. What people have you been observing?
A: The American people.
Q: Could you be more specific?
A: Not a problem. I'm talking boomers, Gen X, 20-somethings, foodies, techies, netizens, fashionistas, suits, the flyover people, bean-counters, the punditocracy, eye candy, A-list directors, midlist authors, the usual suspects, swing voters, the beleaguered middle class, the special interests, stay-at-home moms, feminazis, hotties, angry white males, mental-health professionals, yellow-dog Democrats, high-priced lawyers, the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, the language police, and the glitterati.
Q: Anybody else?
A: Sorry -- senior moment. The Greatest Generation. And that's my final answer :)
Q: Which field of endeavor would you say is most guilty of the perpetration of cliches?
A: Hel-LO??? Let me run these by you: He brought his A-game. He has to step up. A warrior. At this level. X's and O's. A player's coach. They are struggling. A go-to guy. Let the game come to him. Stay within himself. Wake-up call. Gut check. In the zone. Feeling it. Got all of it. Lighting it up. Great tools. A stud.
Q: Oh, I see, you're talking about sports. I love it when they say, "He came to play." What else would he have come for?
A: That is so over. Stick a fork in it.
Q: Sarcasm does not become you, Mr. Arbuthnot.
A: My bad -- I didn't mean to be snarky. Btw, not to play the race card, but the fact of the matter is that the new new thing in cliches, if you will, would have to be homeboy wannabes who try to talk the talk.
Q: Can you give me a frinstance?
A: You go, girlfriend. Back in the day, we had it going on. It was old school in the 'hood -- we were keeping it real. Don't diss that playa -- show him some love, or I'll hit you upside the head. Yo, what it is, kna-mean?
Q: You don't think that appropriating the vernacular allows the language to regenerate itself?
A: Please.
Q: What about the business world?
A: Don't even go there. From the bricks and mortars to Silicon Alley, it's the same old same old. The stretch goal du jour is re-engineering result-driven, on-demand, top-down (and bottom-up) global systems, growing the bandwidth and the brand, leveraging the knowledge base, and fast-tracking proactive, strategic, and backward-compatible multitasking -- all without reinventing the wheel. Are we on the same page?
Q: To be sure. Mr. Arbuthnot, permit me to, as they say, cut to the chase. What, exactly, is wrong with cliches? After all, they wouldn't have become cliches if they weren't very good at communicating certain ideas. So why do the language police get all hot and bothered about them?
A: So you want to open up that can of worms, do you? You're moving the goal posts -- all this heavy lifting wasn't in the job description. But not to worry. I'm okay with taking one for the team. This might help some gravitas rub off on me, too.
But I digress. I'm going to go ahead and dumb down the back story. When you reference cliches, the poster boy -- the 800-pound Dead White Male, as it were -- is the fabulous George Orwell, the late, great iconic pundit. In his canonical text "Politics and the English Language" (which is still state of the art, imho) Orwell famously spin-doctored the issue in terms of the life span of figures of speech. Take "Achilles' heel" (please). The first writer to use this phrase to mean a person's or institution's weak point, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1810, and he was creating a fresh metaphor. Orwell's response to the Cole-ster -- and to anyone expressing an idea in an original, clever, striking, unexpected, vivid and/or amusing way, like the person who coined Silicon Valley, or Silicon Alley, or who first said "cut to the chase" about a noncinematic subject, or even who first applied quotes from commercials, Seinfeld, or Saturday Night Live in other contexts -- would be, "You da man."
After a long while, a popular figure of speech becomes a dead metaphor, which means it "has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness." I.e., it's all good. This is certainly true of Achilles' heel, and probably also of a more recent coinage like Silicon Valley, which can be excused for another reason: It effectively describes an entity for which there is no other word or brief phrase.
The trouble is in between. For a century or so, Achilles' heel was a trite, hackneyed, pawed-over catch phrase -- and these are what we talk about when we talk about cliches. Orwell described the villain of the piece as "the huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves."
Word, that was the money shot. I'm running late, and my gut feeling is that pretty soon I'm going to start channeling William Safire.
Q: Fine, fine. You've been most helpful. Thank you for speaking with us, Mr. Arbuthnot.
A: Thank you. Have a good one.
Ben Yagoda is a professor of English at the University of Delaware and the author of About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (Scribner, 2000). [from the Chronicle of Higher Education]
thanks-- Dear Asp, i was being to think no one got it.
I just read it and thought it was wonderful! May have it framed and stuck on the wall.
dxb.
24/7 With the Cliche Expert
And that from Mr Yagoda was great too. There is (was) a TV programme called "As time goes by" starring Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer that has a character called Alastair who speaks exactly like that.
Thanks, Slithy, it made me laugh out loud.
Orwell described the villain of the piece as "the huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves."
Orwell was right, of course ... but he was smarter than the rest of us, which is why we quote him. At the end of the day, can we say that a buzzword is a word which creates a "buzz"?
When people outside the buzz, buzz in, people in the buzz, buzz off. What is left behind is cliche ... like the Sands apres the Rat Pack.
You might want to remember that the term buzzword was coined by the people that use them.
Then again, you might not.
the term buzzword was coined by the people that use them
True, but the "buzz" in buzzwords is created not by those who coin them, but by those who buzz around them.
Buzzwords are tribal. Too much buzz is deafening to the ear ... and the tribe moves on.
To me "buzzword" has a mostly negative connotation.
I'm not so sure about this. My husband is currently looking for employment. All the recruiters he talks to keep telling him to put more buzzwords into his resume. They seem to prefer the buzzwords to sentences.
Of course, it could be that they're all idiots and don't understand anything but buzzwords.
xara - Does your husband want to fly with that flock?
Ya gotta do watcha gotta do...
Pardon me for not putting the little markes over the "e"s in resume.
The reason for using the buzzwords is that resumes are no longer examined by human beings in many places. They use computers to look for the buzzwords that the hiring person has specified.
I know this first hand because I have been told by our HR people that I was highly qualified for a position but was not referred for interview because the program, Resumix, I think, did not find the words the manager had asked for.
That's when I decided I'd had enough of the bullshit. I don't have the time, energy, or inclination to play guessing games with someone who's stupider than I am. My last day willbe January 10, notwithstanding the fact that we know Peggy's employment is going away March 31.
It looks as though we'll be living in western NC by this time next year. I hope they have internet access!
TEd
"It's like bagging fog."Dunno, FB, I think "herding cats" is a
much better visual, especially if you're talking about trying to get a bunch of people to pull together. Says something about the people involved as well as about the futility of the task.
"Bagging fog" just implies the futility, although it does imply that very well.
"It's like giving a cat a pill" would be another good description of a futile task - one that would probably result in injury to all non-cats present.
it's like getting Ayleurs to agree
We can't even agree that the term ayleur is an abomination and shouldn't be allowed.
An older expression that I haven't heard for years is "It's raining pitchforks." I was reminded of this expression recently while reading a postcard which was written in the late 1800's which mentioned the weather as "raining pitchforks and hammer handles." "Pitchforks", OK, but "hammer handles"?! You KNOW that had to be a drencher!!
AWADers should be obscene but not herded. 
Oh, that was great! My lovely Aunt knows all about herding us cats...
And I am STILL not an ayleur!
Too bad. If more of us agreed to use that title I would write a soap opera for us. Called Ayleur Children.
