The Fine Art of Verbal Douchebaggery
We all have different parts of our vocabulary that we use or save for certain audiences. When it comes to working on a team, these are the types of phrases or words I’d prefer to be saved for the client, ideally in a deck, and hopefully never near me.
“Creative”. Most often used as an adjective like a “creative director”, “creative copywriter”, or a “creative coder”. Often equaled to “competent”, but never said, only implied. Oh, you are a creative technologist? Hrmm. I was looking for one of the non-creative kind, does that mean I am looking for an engineer? Maybe I am just looking for someone who is breathing. Strike out creative and put “living” in its place. How exactly do you direct creativity? Do you make it line up, hold hands and walk single file as you head towards the park?
“What is the ask?” Say this to yourself 10 times over, super fast. Eventually, you’ll end up hearing “What is an ass?”, and as soon as you hear it, you’ll know the answer, and so will everyone else and suddenly you have graduated from being a type of person to the definition of it.
“Bespoke”. Well, a big boisterous fuck you has to be given to the whole artisanal movement for making its bougie way into our everyday work conversations. Sure, why not. Why can’t we take an old British word that specifically refers to men’s tailoring and appropriate the shit out of it, because using “custom” would be like admitting you crave some dirty bird from KFC and long for its unnaturally lime green coleslaw. Let’s show the client we care. Let’s show them we are different. Let’s show them every project is different. Oh, shit. I got it. Let’s just toss the work bespoke in front of everything. Bespoke solution. Bespoke strategy. Bespoke process. When everything becomes bespoken, you have to wonder what the hell isn’t. Two words that should never be side by side : Bespoke WordPress. No. Not happening. Not in this lifetime. What is worse, is when people or companies think this is a competitive advantage. Mission statements say they “ create bespoke solutions…”. Please. Of course you are going to create a custom solution. People are not coming to you because they are looking for some prime production line work of the cookie cutter variety. File under things you will never hear someone say — “ Oh, sorry. I am searching for a company that provides template-driven solutions at a high profit margin and still charges me the custom cost”.
“Curate”. Like bespoke. It used to have some type of meaning. Now a person posting gifs of facial reactions on a low-traffic Tumblr is a “curator”.
“Low Hanging Fruit”. This should never be used unless it refers to the older male anatomy, and with some affection.
“Ideation”. Right. Want to sound like kind of a big deal? Just make an every day normal event or task sound like a complex process. Yes, let us get together for some ideation, where we converse and ideate within a cognitive framework developed for the discovery of new and exciting ideas. Ok, what. I’m pretty sure its pronounced brain storming. Instead of “thinking about something”, we are all now “ideating”, marinating in our own idea brine, taking Portlandia’s “Pickle It” motto to an entirely whole new level.
“Agile”. Too often used out of context, selectively borrowing ideas and principles from agile software development and bastardizing the fuck out of it. Suddenly agencies are taking an “iterative approach” or “design iteratively” and have product teams with product owners and product processes like agile development, yet a scrum master is painfully missing and the Fibonacci sequence is just too hard to remember and oh shit, what the hell are story points again? Instead of meeting, people are having scrums that are drawn out, slow and painful, like watching a geriatric game of rugby, more than adopting an agile process. Agile has been fully embraced and adopted, but in name only. Now here is when it becomes confusing: add a person to the team who is actually familiar with Agile processes, and suddenly they are in a perpetual state of confusion because the taxonomy and language of Agile has been adopted to describe a very different set of processes.
“Momfluential”. Congratulations. You just took two words and smushed them together.Off you go to create every variation you can imagine now.
“Mission Critical”. We work in advertising.It is advertising.Everything is pretty much mission critical to someone, at some point, even though none of it really is because I’m pretty sure those Momfluentials you mentioned will hardly notice that the logo is a few pixels off. They’ll just notice that it’s not big enough. Now that is mission critical.
“Blue Sky Thinking”. When you are thinking about a place with no restrictions, no limitations, no connection to the immediate reality,we are told to look up. Blue sky — the keeper of creative freedom, where at some point you wonder when exactly you are going to get the classic swoop and poop — a move reserved for those in power and seagulls alike. What is the opposite of “blue sky thinking” ?
We can’t help the way we talk to clients, but we can help the way we talk to each other. Simplicity reigns. You don’t need big words to prove your capabilities, but they sure do help to prove you can be a capital D douchebag.
