Defiantly reaching out

Yesterday I got an email from a vendor that said, among other things, the following:

we will defiantly reach out if we have any questions

It’s obviously an honest mistake, and all I should have done was chuckle and move on.  But I didn’t.  First I started thinking about how one would defiantly reach out to someone else with questions.  Perhaps, “I have a question, and I don’t care what your opinion is about it, but you WILL answer me!”?  I’m not sure.

And then I sent it to Keri, because I just wasn’t ready to be done with it.  She took it one step further, so I feel like it’s appropriate to copy her exact email here:

Two things:

“Defiantly.” Hilarious.

“Reaching out” as a term for “contact” or “call” or “email.” That really annoys me. “Why don’t you reach out to Chris and get more information?” No. No, I will NOT “reach out” to Chris. I don’t need Chris to save me and Chris doesn’t need counseling from me. I just need to CONTACT him.

Just say CONTACT.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

…Okay. I’m better now.

So clearly Keri has some issues.  But aside from that, it sparked a discussion on the use of fancy business jargon when good old-fashioned regular words would actually work just fine:

Reach out should be Contact
Leverage should be Use
Solve (as a noun) should be Solution
Touch base should Talk to
Absolutely should be Yes

And the list goes on and on.  So I ask of our tens of blog readers – what other phrases are we missing?  What business jargon drives you nuts?

By the way, to top it all off, this morning I received a widely distributed email where the author thanked a bunch of people for “breasting this tsunami project despite the aggressive timeline and other adverse conditions.”

I really have no idea how you would “breast a project,” so if anyone has any ideas about what that might mean, let us know…

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