Saturday, August 02, 2008
Cubicle Conversation - WSJ.com
If you want to sound "savvy", you may need this new book...
Charles Harrington Elster reviews it in the Wall Street Journal:
"If you want to be the boss or 'fancy yourself the savviest kid on Wall Street,' what you need instead, says Gregory Bergman, associate editor of Equities Magazine, is a vocabulary replete with 'BizzWords.' That play on buzzwords satirizes the mania for using internal capitalization in corporate and trade names -- SwingLine, ChevronTexaco, HarperCollins -- a practice that is prosaically called 'BiCapitalization.' (I like to call it 'upsizing.')
BizzWords constitute the 'emerging vocabulary' of business English, according to Mr. Bergman, and in his book 'BizzWords' he offers us a collection of 'some of the newest, hippest, and most important . . . terms used in corporate America today.' His dictionary "is all you need to sound like a business big shot," he boasts with marketing tongue in cheek. 'Now if you could only figure out how to use Excel.'
Not all words are created equal, and time and chance happeneth to them all. Though many of the locutions in this lighthearted lexicon may be here today and gone tomorrow, more than a few of them are clever and useful and deserving of attention, if not always acceptance."
