Susan Orlean Quotes

Buzzwords and cliches - those are stock in trade. There's nothing wrong with them.

If you're talking about how you promoted synergy in an organization, that could mean you just got everybody together for donuts twice a week.

Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.

Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.

Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface.

Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language, we have jargon: instead of principles, slogans: and, instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas.

I'm really fascinated by lingos and colloquialisms that are outmoded and have gone by the wayside. I love the way people spoke in the '30s, and the amazing slang of the mid-'60s and '70s.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

I don't like to use 'gourmet' because it has become so overused and abused.

Of all the depressing abuses of language in business, there is none that gets me so incensed as the rampant overuse of the word 'passionate' in company slogans, marketing blurbs, mission statements and on the sides of vans.

I think we invent jargon because it saves times talking to one-another.

I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, this can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second.

Gobbledygook! [The word was born.]

Jargon: any technical language we do not understand.

I'm not actually perishing, but I do feel like I die a little every time someone uses 'literally' to mean 'really.'

Language is essentially tribal, so jargon can actually be a really good thing because it unites people.

Slang is really coded talk. I can say a few things, in front of somebody, that only people who know what I'm saying are going to pick up on.

Everything isn't about synergy.

Slang moves on so fast that most new words disappear soon after they are coined. But there is always something that sticks behind.

I'm kind of over people using the word 'bae'. Let's get rid of that.

We are surrounded by hundreds of 'tribes,' each speaking their own distinct slanguage of colourful words, jokes and phrases that together form an idiosyncratic phrasebook, years in the making.

Linguistic supersizing is on the increase, and it may show the influence of advertising-speak and corporate jargon on language, in which everything needs to be hyped to get noticed. It means that some of our greatest words are losing their power.

I overuse words. My kids catch me saying stuff. They're like, 'Hey, you say that all the time.' 'Boom' is one of those things.

Apparently Sodapop Curtis said "gnarly," and Chris Traeger said "literally." Every decade I have a favorite phrase I can't stop with.

I think America just needs to get real when it comes to the way our kids speak and communicate. They need to understand what happens in rap.