9 completely pointless corporate words
Business jargon seems to have become obsessed with coinages for things there are already words for. What’s wrong with the words in the dictionary?
What’s a learning? It’s apparently more than just the gerund or present participle of the verb “learn.” It’s so much more! Now, it also means “something that has been learned,” like a building is something that has been built.
Someone might say, for example, “We came away from this social media project with lots of learnings we can share with management.”
The only problem is that there’s already a word for something one has learned: It’s a “lesson.” There’s even already a buzzword for it: “takeaway.” So why pull a Dr. Frankenstein and assemble a new word from the parts of another?
It seems this trend doesn’t bother only me. There’s a website dedicated to it, learnings.org, named for the word that perked my ears up to begin with. The site accepts submissions for the most obnoxious corporate buzzwords out there. I scanned the site’s archives to find eight more words with little to no reason for existing.
Wordsmithing
The real word: Editing
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