For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for May 06, 2018

one would wonder, John

I hope those two know what they said because I have very little idea of what they refer to. Apparently I have no reference to their database.

This is one of those comic strips that makes me really appreciate how well Scott Adams does this kind of corporate dialogue in Dilbert.

You can find variations of that kind of speak, what Mr. T would call “jibber-jabber” in the military and politics too. It is a means of keeping nosy Nellies from understanding your precise meaning. It isn’t used to elucidate it is for confusion and opacity of meaning.

His whole word salad was about finding and motivating the best ones in your group. But when you are also among experts talking shop it can sound similar if you don’t understand what they are talking about. Whether it is physics or biology or anything you can imagine for the Ph D crowd.

A pretty thorough parody of “Businessspeak”. Lynn’s own comments:

“I had a friend who added “ology” and “ality” to a number of words. Once the first “ology” came out, I couldn’t listen to what he was saying. It was all “BS-ology” after that."

Scott Adams was of course more of a pro at parodying this kind of talk, having lived it for so long. But this was MUCH earlier, and still a very good example of “using 60 words when one will do” and “Saying high-priced nothing”.

What happened to running it up the flagpole to see who salutes ?

I thought that I was the only one who had a hard time hearing the word ‘basically’… I thought that it was a new term but I guess this comic was ahead of it’s time. basically.

Long words are so superfluous and photosynthesis!

John should consider a home Dentist office: lose the Hi-rise rent & the elevator nonsense!

I always used the expression “You can’t BS a BS’r!” Those two are BS.

Of course they do!

Jargon lives forever.

There’s a website that will automatically generate whole random paragraphs of that kind of talk, free of charge.

Otherwise, known as baffling them with BS.

I’ve wondered that myself.

As soon as anyone uses any form of “utilize,” I stop listening.

I’m convinced that “C-level” management and their VPs don’t have the faintest idea what they’re talking about. Like so many other self-absorbed groups, they thrive off of their own buzzwords.

I know it’s petty, but my pet hate is “utilize”. What on earth is wrong with “use”?

The aesthetic impetus pursuant to the aforementioned inadvertently subjugates a subjective assessment.

Abraham Lincoln was once at a debate. After his opponent gave a heavy intellectual speech full of puffery, Lincoln simply brought it back to simplicity. He asked “How many legs would a horse have if we called its tail a leg?”

An audience member responded “Five?”

“The answer is four.” said Lincoln “Calling a tail a leg does not make it so.”

9 out of 10 hockey interviews start off with the player saying “obviously” Obviously,my favourite!

paid to talk not do.

Boring! I never bothered to even read it.

If you pare away the baffle-gab, there are actually a few decent ideas in there. Which is often the case.

My idea of hell is to be stuck in an elevator with a couple of Marketing Strategists !

BS bingo, anyone?

My English teacher grandmother always said that we should eschew meretricious sesquipedalianisms.

My granny would label that as gobbledygook.

Sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher to me; “Wah-wah-wah, wawahwawah, wah, wah, wah.”

You can tell it’s an older strip because they did’t say “proactive”.

From personal experience I’ve found that people who talk like that don’t know sh!t from Shinola and lack even basic common sense.

Basically, access to accessibility has to be utilized proactively…

; – /

It appears to be two Consultant/Salesmen conversing in their native jargon/speak. It looks like they are consulting on/selling to the corporate Human Resources demographic.

Sorry. It kinda rubs off. eeeewww

On his way off the elevator, John should have said, “except on Tuesday, when 2 Jacks equal half a Fizbin”.

Google “Mission Statement “ by Weird Al Yankovic.

When i hear ‘at the end of the day..’ my mind wander away.

It occured to me as a DR. Jon is probably smarter than those two yahoos combined.

I once took a college level Engineering Economics course. The book would have only been about 50 pages if it had been printed in plain English. Colleges for some reason measure a book’s worth by its weight and number of pages (the book didn’t mention this). So, they just fluffed the book up with hot air until it was about 700 pages. I memorized one of the medium-length sentences of the last page I read, just for future reference. And from then on I just took notes on what the professor said, and left the book/paperweight alone. The sentence was, more or less, “Thus, the ultimate success of any engineering project, depends on the engineer’s ability, both individually and collectively, to maximize their employment of the methodologies and techniques that facilitate task accomplishment.” And there was 700 pages of this baloney! It would make my mind go numb for an hour after reading just a page or two. This is where the type of computer that was mentioned in Asimov’s Foundation science fiction series would come in handy: You could put in a formal treaty, or a 700 page economics book written by a gas-bag, and it would translate it to standard English. In the science fiction book, it translated a 3-page treaty into a blank page. One of the humans had to expand that summary to: “We owe you nothing, and you owe us nothing!” So, this computer could have reduced that unreadable book to about 50 pages of readable English. In this case, it is a gas-bagging contest to try and impress John, who was indeed impressed, but not in the way they wanted.

John, people like that talk like that when everyone else has left the room from no longer wanting to hear their crap, liking to hear their own voice telling themselves how smart they think they are in which every story they think they are the hero.

The ability to know the difference between junk speak and highly technical jargon is good to have. And to increase your vocabulary is like learning to paint with not only more colors but also the shades and tints of them too.

Plus – the elevator music had too much linear distortion in the downward modulation peaks! (If you can’t dazzle ’em with your brilliance, baffle ’em with BS!!)