JamesM

Speaking of cultural assimilation has anybody watched this facking awful World Cup of Iced Hockey bollocks????

They just played the Canadian anthem but didn't bother playing the "Anthem of Europe"??? It's days like this I feel cheated on my cable payment. More so than other days any way.

dbd33

"In the past 24", "reached out", "had a conversation", every speaker at the scrum (that I can understand) will use one of those phrases. Most speakers will use more than one and it's not usual to have cause to make reference to anyone not in the room.

I don't think this is business speak so much as Canadian speak. Local people will say, for example, "I reached out to the weather channel" or "I reached out to the daycare and had a conversation". People striving to assimilate will "reach out to the doctor today morning". Reach out means as much as, "you know?". It's not a phrase that conveys very much, certainly less than "I phoned", it's just waffle. Inoffensive waffle in the case of Canadians but disappointing when the speaker is from the UK and could speak concisely.

Retards is, of course, not an acceptable turn of phrase. Say that in the scrum and there'll be reaching out to the off boarding solution designers.

JonboyE

The only people I hear using "reached out to" are bankers that have recently been transferred out west from Toronto. Small business around here is pleasantly corporate speak free.

Alan2005

My sides.

Shard

Yes, I think it's just become cliched speech, and you can notice it when someone really over uses it. Some years back when "at the end of the day" was at it's apex, I recall hearing a London youth complaining in a shop where every sentence was either preceded or completed (sometimes both!) by the phrase "end of the day". Ya know wha I mean.

dbd33

First email of the day begins "The Infrastructure team reached out to us regarding..."

"Reached out" is popular in scrums, I think, because of it's connotation of helplessness. If your work is filled with much confusion, and results are just an illusion, you reach out for someone to shelter you, someone to see you through, and they're not there, well then it aint your fault if you haven't delivered.

Oakvillian

This, I think.
It's all about positioning yourself to be able to claim credit for the good stuff, but absolve yourself of blame or responsibility when things go tits up. So much of business-speak language is about replacing the concrete with the abstract, replacing the active with the passive. Politicians do it all the time, too, in fact they're probably the group of people that first (if you'll excuse the language) caused the phenomenon to be mainstreamed. Now everyone's doing it, verbing nouns, abstracting stuff to the point of, well, abstraction.

A (significantly younger and more thrusting) colleague earlier this week in a "stand-up" suggested we reach out to somebody to timetable a rollout and an onboarding webinar. I had to be careful not to guffaw. "OK," I wanted to say, "I'll give him a call, we'll sort out a time for installing the software and training his staff." But in reality I thought it expedient to just agree with the proposed course of action... life's too short.

caretaker

Every Dilbert book is based on the insanity of office politics and language. It's American but that doesn't matter since no nationality has a patent on that nonsense.

BristolUK

.

dbd33

I just received this "I will reach out to you tomorrow after I made the change."

I believe this combines two trends in office speak. Grandiloquence, he could have said "I'll tell you" and illiteracy in English, he'll have no idea that his tenses are tangled. Still, he is someone who gets the job done, I like that.

Oink

I don't mind the office new-speak, most of it is quite inventive. That said, I rather bristle at the over use of institutional acronyms, which I fear is much about exclusion as they about convenience. I remember a three day meeting/briefing in College Park and I sat there for about a day and half before I could figure out what everyone was talking about. All the various institutions seem to have their own language. On a side note, I remember the catering being particularly good though so it wasn't a complete waste time.

scrubbedexpat091

Since this thread has shifted a bit to working in Canada, what about companies trying to spin something as a benefit when its required by labor standards.

Such as vacation, I see it so often under benefits, 2 weeks vacation after 1 year, which just happens to also be the minimum required under labor standards.

Or the spin to make low pay sound good.

BristolUK

I get the vacation part - the person looking may not know - but how does low pay sound good? Is it saying something like above minimum wage, but only being slightly more?

Oakvillian

And I doubt he would have thanked you for having pointed out that he would have been better to have used the future-perfect-conditional or whatever it will have ought to have meant to have been... there's no helping some people

dbd33

Especially not graduates of the University of Waterloo.