What's wrong with plain English?
How have we managed to get to the stage where anyone with any pretentions to be management - whatever that is - feels the need to invent their own language with words that flow across the ear like bricks dropping on glass.
English is a perfectly good language which has managed for quite some centuries now to cover just about every situation yet we now have a generation of suits, male and female, with the literary ability of DHS pamphlets, who are either unable to cope with the language of Shakespeare or the King James I Bible or, even more frightening, think they can improve on it.
Hence we end up with stupid terms such as describing a firm, an inorganic creation if ever there was one, growing organically as if it was some form of bacteria.
Latest of these phrases to clatter up the English language comes from the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust who tell us about their website "To use a current buzzword the site is "Patient Centric'" adding helpfully for those who do not speak gibberish, "or centred around the patients (note the missing apostrophe!) experience."
It appears English should be their first patient.
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Roger Clarke - Birmingham’s very own Grumpy Old Man on what gets right up his nose.
I agree with you about "patient centric".It doesn't "trip merrily across the tongue",does it?It actually has connotations of something unpleasant, as it sounds a bit like "egocentric".
However, in a sense a language is, metaphorically speaking, "organic", as we're now a big melting pot of cultures, each of which pronounces, and often spells English differently.
Perhaps that's why acronyms are so popular in management speak, though they're about as welcome to the language as one medical one,MRSA, is to the hospital ward!
Apostrophes seem to be slipped into adverts randomly, e.g "Hamster's for sale", yet, as Lynne Truss pointed out on her book,the apostrophe S in a case like this should denote possession, e.g "the hamster's cage".
I suppose that, with globalisation and textspeak causing the English language to evolve in ever more diverse ways,we can't assume that everyone is going to learn the lyrical language of Shakespeare, and maybe there'll come a day when the Queen's speech is beamed out, complete with subtitles!