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Once a year or so in the IndyCar offseason, I will take a step back from my usual cheery disposition, put on my curmudgeon hat and drift away from discussing IndyCar racing – for a day, anyway – to discuss how much I loathe the trendy sayings that have invaded our everyday lives. Being the increasingly crusty old goat that I am, I don’t take kindly to the latest trends in our everyday language. I tend to be fairly plainspoken, but we are being constantly bombarded with wordy and unnecessary pretentious sayings.

I’m not sure how often I’ve updated this rant, but recently it has been an annual thing. Most readers coming here to read about Alexander Rossi or Josef Newgarden, would probably prefer I didn’t do this, but I find it therapeutic – a way to keep my sanity in an ever-increasing pretentious world, where people love the sound of their own voice – especially when that voice is saying something hip and trendy.

Some of the items on this list you’ve read here before. I keep hoping if I continue to list them, they will mercifully go away. With the IndyCar season quickly approaching, I figured I’d better throw this together, or it may be another year before I do. Who knows what foolish trendy corporate buzzwords and sayings people will be babbling by then?

Pivot: It used to be that in order to be successful at just about anything, you had to be flexible. That is a good word that is very descriptive. No one questions what it means to be flexible. Since my mantra in life is Change is Bad, flexibility has never been one of my strengths – but I certainly know what it means.

But today, that is considered boring by corporate types. Somewhere along the way, someone decided that instead of being flexible – it was much better that we all learn to pivot. When the pandemic was playing havoc with the 2020 IndyCar schedule, it was said that the powers-that-be were learning to pivot on a moment’s notice. I just thought they had to be flexible.

Reach Out: I may be mistaken, but I think this one may have been included on every list of these I’ve done. I will call, text or e-mail someone, but I will never reach out to anyone. Unfortunately, it has become a way of life to reach out to someone rather than contact them. It just sounds a little too warm and fuzzy. Can you imagine AJ Foyt reaching out to someone? No, he calls them. If that doesn’t work, he whops them over the head with a tire-tool, but he will never reach out to them. No one should.

Journey:  No, this isn’t the 80s rock band. If you think reaching out is touchy-feely; journey takes it up a notch. Everyone wants to label a certain part of your life as your journey. When my son was going through some teenage struggles about fifteen years ago; well-meaning folks would always refer to this as his journey. When people are faced with a terrible situation or a crisis, it’s popular to give it a soft label like journey to make it sound more like an adventure. Just call it what it is – a bad time in your life that you hope to get through.

Granular: I was in a meeting back in December, when someone from the local chamber, with a mythical title for his nebulous job was pitching some new way of doing something. He kept using the term granular, making me think he had sand in his shoes. He must’ve said granular no less than ten times in a twenty-minute presentation. I kept listening to how he was using it, and I finally deduced that he meant specific.

My question is, why didn’t he just say specific? People that use corporate buzzwords are more interested in sounding cool and hip than they are in actually communicating properly. If I am sitting in a meeting hearing you say granular over and over, and I’m wondering what in the world you mean – you are not communicating. You are just self-absorbed in your use of pretentious buzzwords.

Price Point: There actually is such a term as price point, but the pretentious people have taken it and now use it simply to mean…price. If you Google the term price point, you realize that even the experts aren’t real sure what it means. Some define it as a range, while others define it as an exact price.

My question is, if there is such disparity and confusion on the correct definition of a term – why use it at all?

I first heard price point used to simply mean price, last fall when I was about to buy a car. I did a lot of research and watched a lot of You Tube videos on different cars and models. It was there when I heard these reviewers constantly talking about the price point of a car being too high. I wondered why they didn’t just say “the price was too high”. When someone uses two words, when one will do – the reason is usually because they are trying to sound intelligent. Don’t bother.

Literally: There is a correct way of using the word “literally” in a conversation, but most people today use it incorrectly and way too much. If I say that I literally jumped three feet in the air – that would mean I wasn’t exaggerating. I actually jumped that high. That would have been a couple of decades ago when I could still jump that high, but at one time – that would have been a literal statement…literally.

But people, today say “I literally jumped twenty feet in the air”, simply to prove a point. If you are saying something that is obviously very exaggerated, it is not literal. It’s now a figure of speech.

I literally hear people misusing this word, over a hundred-thousand times a day.

Bye Week: This has become a new sports-related pet-peeve that will tick off some that use it. They will say this is the ultimate in being picky. A bye is a round in a tournament when a team or participant gets a free pass to advance to the next round. For example, the Tennessee Titans earned a first-round bye in the NFL playoffs, meaning they rested for the first week, while everyone else played and they were guaranteed to be one of the final four teams remaining in the AFC. Not that it did them any good, as they blew a golden opportunity and sleep-walked through their game with the Bengals – one of the two participants in this weekend’s Super Bowl.

But people tend to misuse the word bye during the regular season. During the 2021 NFL season, there were seventeen games scheduled for each team across eighteen weeks – giving each team one off-weekend each season. But fans almost always refer to this off week as a team’s bye week. It isn’t a bye week, it is that team’s off week, when they get a weekend off. Only two NFL teams had bye weeks this past season – the Titans and the Packers. And they were both eliminated early.

Historical:   This word is suddenly being misused. Historical refers to history in general, such as a historical timeline or a historical society. But some people feel the more syllables, the better. Recently I’ve noticed that many people are saying historical, when they should go with the shorter and correct historic. Anything that has had a significant affect on history is historic, not historical. When Helio Castroneves became only the fourth person to win the Indianapolis 500 four times, and the first to do it in thirty years – that was a historic event, but it wasn’t historical. My only question is – is it a historic event, or is it an historic event? I think if I’m speaking, I put an an before it. If I’m writing it, I use a…I think.

Robust: This is a word I once used to describe a good cup of coffee. Lately, I’ve heard it used to describe a report or document that was overwhelming or contained too much information. “That report you sent me was just a little too robust”.

Again, if people look at you wondering what you meant by a certain phrase – don’t use it.

Scalable Solutions: This sounds like the name of a company. Instead, it is a very trendy corporate phrase. I am hearing this one a lot in webinars, generally from people that live elsewhere. I finally had to ask a co-worker what it meant. The best she could figure was that it meant ways to grow your program. Why can people not speak plain English anymore?

Gifted: You’ve seen this one before, but I am reminded how much it angers me each year at Christmas. The word gift is a noun. It is a thing. I give a gift to my wife Susan. Recently, however, it has become quite trendy to try and make the word gift a verb. After Christmas, I saw a lot of people on Facebook showing various items that someone had gifted to them. No! She gave you that coffee mug, she didn’t gift it to you. That makes about as much sense as saying we are going to car ourselves to Indianapolis in May.

Level Set: As with many of these, I picked this one up on a Zoom call. There is something about the virtual world that makes some people even more pretentious than they already are (if that’s possible). When I heard someone say that we have to get to a level set, I envisioned my brothers playing with their Erector Set on Christmas morning, when we were kids.

No, level set is not an engineering or construction term. It’s the new term for a group of people all being on the same page – which I suppose was considered a buzzword when that phrase started being used decades ago. Telling a group that we need to get to a level set, means that we need to be on the same page or to be working together for one common goal. If you want us to be on the same page, don’t say level set.

Right??? I’ve had this on here before. But it is so irritating, it bears repeating again and again until people stop it. My ex-father-in-law who, unlike his daughter, was a very likeable guy. But he had one annoying habit of following up everything I said with the phrase “Is that right?” I could utter the most benign phrase like; I had eggs for breakfast. Is that right? I stopped off at the grocery store on my way home. Is that right?

He was old-school, being born in 1930. Today, that annoying trait has been updated to something far more irritating – I know, right??? Sometimes, they just shorten it to Right???

I cannot tell you how much that makes my skin crawl. Susan and I have a friend who throws out the I know, right??? at the most inappropriate times. I can be in the middle of a story, when she interrupts mid-sentence with a I know, right??? Sometimes I’ll just stop and stare, wondering why she would choose then to throw it out there. It’s almost like an involuntary reflex, as if she has Tourette Syndrome or something.

Unfortunately, I think she got it from the many “funny” commercials out there, that always has the hip mom or dad responding with I know, right???

These Trying or Unprecedented Times: After COVID went into full gear in March of 2020, it didn’t take long for TV and radio commercials to jump on the latest opportunity to sell whatever. Invariably, a piano would play softly in the background as a soothing voice discussed these trying and unprecedented times. They assured us that whatever profession they were in, they were here for us. It didn’t take long for these commercials to all morph into each other where you were unsure with what was being sold, but the message was always the same. Two years later, these times have a precedent.

Disaggregated Data: To me, this is the worst one yet. I (literally) had to stop in the middle of the conversation and ask what that meant. The simple translation is data that has been separated or sorted. Why not just say that in the first place?

Boots on the Ground:  Upper management always likes to use this term to refer to the ones that are getting the actual work done. When I entered the workforce a few decades ago, we were referred to as those that were "out in the field", to differentiate us from those that worked in the ivory tower corporate office. It was descriptive enough, but I guess someone was afraid it made us feel like farmhands. So the term boots on the ground was given to us that were not in the corporate office. I don’t see that as an improvement, because we are still the ones getting the work done.

Fair Enough: These days, almost everyone at work is younger than I am. But I have two young co-workers who sometimes speak in a jargon that I seldom recognize. I think they are both bad influences on each other. Overall, I enjoy chatting with them and they are both very intelligent. But they both have this very annoying habit of following practically everything I say with “Fair enough”.

I think I’ll go eat my lunch. Fair enough. Susan and I are going to grill out tonight. Fair enough. It’s literally too much.

The Usual Suspects: This annual rant would not be complete without the usual non-words I complain about. Flustrated and irregardless are the two that come to mind the quickest. Flustrated gets to me more than anything because I’m hearing it more and more every year. I’m afraid it will become an accepted part of the English language as a portmanteau – the blending of two words to become an actual word. Smog, for example is a portmanteau. It combined smoke and fog to become smog. It would frustrate me if that happened to flustrated. Then there are the usual corporate buzzwords and phrases I could list year after year – like metrics, optics, drill-down, deep-dive, circle-back, in the weeds and my all-time favorite; Let’s put that in the parking lot.

My hope is that none of you reading this ever use these trendy phrases or buzzwords. If you do and I’ve angered you; fair enough!

George Phillips

This entry was posted on February 9, 2022 at 4:04 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.