buzzwords

In its most simple interpretation, a "pain point" is exactly what it sounds like: something so unpleasant that one is likely to try hard to avoid it or fix it. But buzzwords sometimes shift meanings, and for some boardroom jargon-slingers, pain point now means something very different.

These are the brand addicts every company dreams about -- engaged, highly loyal consumers. But one has to wonder if there are just too many istas these days. Frugalistas, recessionistas, Palinistas, urbanistas and more -- it's enough to make a buzzwordista burst.

In business jargon, it seems like round has come back around. We're hearing a resurgence of the defense-minded phrase "circling the wagons," as well as the extremely slippery phrase "circle back," which changes its meaning completely depending on who's saying it.

Bucketize may not be the most odious piece of business jargon to hit the scene in the past decade, but in its short life, it has earned a barrel-full of derision for being one of the most pointless. There's just no need for another synonym for categorizing, sorting or organizing.

In the testosterone-laden enclaves of America's business class, buzzwords tend to be a bit manly. Perhaps the best example is "tent pole," a term that refers to a company's most promising, prominent or profitable product -- except when it refers to its biggest problem.

Conventional wisdom can't make an unprofitable earnings statement disappear, or turn a falling stock into a rising one. But there's one easy way to flip those frowns upside-down: Pair that bad news with upbeat terms and turn a recession into a period of negative growth.

You can't call layoffs downsizing anymore, and offshoring sounds just as bad to workers as "shipping your jobs to Asia." What to do? Come up with better buzzwords, of course. And who could object to something so "right" as rightsizing or rightshoring?

Once a clearly defined term that meant "to use force to compel or control a physical thing," drive has become one of the most insidious and overused buzzwords in the business lexicon. What's being driven now is often intangible, and the mechanics of who or what's doing the driving are a mystery. Hey, let's drive some eyeballs to this story!

Canines seem to bring out the business sector's creativity, when it comes to the appropriate descriptive phrase. From the "Dogs of the Dow" to "eat your own dog food" to any business snafu derided as a "dog's dinner," U.S. finance makes no bones about lapping-up slang terms evoking Man's Best Friend.

Forget political correctness. Business jargon is one of the last bastions of old-fashioned, rough and tumble crudity. Little surprise, then, that boardroom buzzwords sometimes veer into racism, sexism or -- in the case of "open kimono" -- a combination of the two.