Nonsense Words

 

Observation. There are a lot of words and phrases that get thrown around that are essentially meaningless or contradictory. They become buzzwords that seem like they have value but are just filler.

There is a car repair tv commercial that runs locally here fairly often. The ad has an announcer that says, “we specialize in foreign and domestic vehicles.” Well, that’s like ALL vehicles. And that’s the opposite of what “specialize” means. There are no Alpha Centauri vehicles. If you specialize in everything you don’t specialize. And that’s fine, but then don’t say it.

I just saw a commercial for One a Day vitamins. Big ad, obviously gazillion dollar parent company. The announcer says, “it’s the #1 multi-vitamin uniquely designed for men and women.” Oh, good. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve taken hermaphrodite vitamins. They even put “Uniquely Designed” up on the screen. Maybe they’re trying to differentiate kid vitamins, but I don’t think so. I think they’re doing just what the car repair placed did. They’re trying to make it sound JUST FOR YOU, but they don’t want to actually cut out half of their purchasers by saying it’s only for men or women.

https://www.ispot.tv/ad/I0ee/one-a-day-overwhelming

Businesses are uniquely vulnerable to buzzwords. When I worked in IT, we would have a new buzzword every 3 years. Like, a big buzzword that every Executive VP would start pestering us to invest in. When Cloud [Computing] first started as a buzzword, I was like, dude, that’s just the internet. Yahoo mail is cloud computing, and I’ve had it for decades. They’ve finally started going past just storing stuff on the net and have more, but for a long time it was just a fancy word for non-local data storage.

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