Good morning, All,

We used to have a poster called C-A-T. It went something like this: “At about 20,000 words, journalist, writers, doctors, lawyers and are credited with having the largest vocabularies. Next come white collar workers and other professionals at about 16,000, then blue collar workers at about 12,000. Laborers have about 6,000 words at their disposal. The jury is still out on art directors.” And anyone who has worked closely or for any amount of time with an art director knows that the truth is, they just can’t spell. SpellCheck helps, but we still do not live in a perfect world.

Tech has a different issue, and it has to do with the terms we use. And overuse. Not only do we love our terms, but we cling to them and repeat them ad nauseam. We deep dive. We drill down. We move things to the front burner. We move things to the back burner. We move a lot of things into the cloud.

We close the round. We open the kimono. We move the needle. We push the envelope. We drink the Kool Aid. We move higher up the food chain. We downsize. We right size. We do the heavy lifting. We pivot. We brain dump. We brain drain. We hard stop. We lean in. We innovate. We iterate.

We sometimes change it up a bit – and then everyone starts using it, so nothing really changes. We used to give the view from 10,000 feet. The term du jour is ‘moonshot.’

We don’t have to see yet another year-end list to know that it’s high time to lose the lingo. Keep it simple and original. Eyes forward and focus. Live long and prosper. Onward and forward.