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HBS Bon Mot Enriches the Lingo
Topics: Communication-Spoken CommunicationSociety-CultureInnovation-Collaborative InnovationPick a word or phrase you love to hate, be it “impactful,” “scalable,” “mission-critical,” “face time,” or...well, don’t get us started. Such utterances, unlike memorable, enduring slang terms, are ephemeral due to their very vapidity. They are “buzzwords,” according to Webster’s New World Dictionary, words or phrases “used by members of some in-group, having little or imprecise meaning but sounding impressive to outsiders.”
While business must take its fair share of the blame for promoting these and other annoyances, we were delighted to learn that the term “buzzword” was “coined in the middle 1940s by students at the Harvard Business School,” according to the December 2000-January 2001 edition of Copy Editor newsletter, which cited the Dictionary of American Slang.
“Buzzword,” a useful and long-lived appellation because it so aptly describes what it derides, thus becomes the first bit of HBS classroom jargon (e.g., cold call, chip shot) to really go national. Who were the linguistic geniuses that first articulated “buzzword”? Was it “a shortening of ‘business,’ ” as the Dictionary of American Slang speculates? Alumni from the 1940s or others who can shed light on this matter are invited to message the Bulletin anytime, 24/7.
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