My extended end-to-end solution for leveraging and optimizing marketing communications transparently across the universe

This post requires a little more background information about myself. I have always wanted to be a writer, but I am too lazy to expend the energy to write a novel and get it published (for example, right now I'm writing this blog entry instead of finishing the first chapter of a novel I started writing). Instead, I have sought out jobs where I could write and edit smaller pieces without having to hire an agent and weep over three rejection letters from publishers, three being about the number of publishing companies that are left after all the publishing house mergers.

Over time, I've found myself doing a lot of technical editing and marketing writing--for companies that like "to blur" the distinction between technical publications and marketing publications. Actually, in the marketing business, they call marketing publications like brochures "collateral," one of the many terms that is misused today. In my world, which is one that involves using a fabulous invention called the "dictionary," collateral means something that you use as security when you apply for a loan at the bank. I can just see the face of a loan officer if I tried to buy a Porsche and told him or her, "The collateral for this loan will be two brochures and a radio ad about how trustworthy I am."

Anyway, now that I've been writing and editing marketing copy for more than 10 years, I feel that I've been exposed to just about every form of abuse of the English language from the minds of people who probably slept through any grammar lessons they took, if such things are even offered anymore. The abuse has gone from making verbs out of nouns like "prioritize"out of "priority" to misusing a simple word like "transparent," to the blatant misuse of parts of speech, such as using "spend" as a noun.

It seems that all marketing copy that comes to me in my email or in a Word document was all written by the same uneducated, jargon-stuffed person. Here is a sample (yes, sample, not sampling) of what I see all the time:

• "End-to-end solution" - What else is a solution but end to end? If you're solving something, then it is going to have an end. Otherwise, it's not a solution but a product. I'm tempted to start a company that promises "In the middle solutions: - We give you the middle part of the solution process and you're on your own after that."
• "Extends the end-to-end solution" - If a solution is end to end, then how the heck can it be extended?
• "Tightly integrated" - How do you tightly integrate something? Do you pack a school built for 500 students with 1000 students, making sure that all races are evenly represented? Now, that's tight integration. If you mean that two different computer programs can work with each other if a third one handles the communication, then just call it "integrated" and be done with it.
• "Leverage" - This is one I really hate. When I see "this end-to-end solution can leverage your existing investments in technology," I see a piece of software using a lever to pry apart servers and workstations.
• "Loosely coupled" - This sounds obscene to me. I can imagine all kinds of lewd ways that two or more people can couple loosely. Add "leverage" to that, such as "this end-to-end solution can leverage your loosely coupled outputs" and the picture gets even nastier.
• "Out of the box" - This is one of the hottest marketing phrases out there today and the silliest, especially when someone applies it to software or servers. I envision someone in an IT department cranking a handle so that a piece of software comes out. Nothing to do with computers is "out of the box." Software is either downloaded from the Web or uploaded from a CD. Servers do not come loaded with everything you need to run them or your programs--there is always something you need to put on them.
• "Out-of-the-box best practices" - Why yes, I'm always pulling best practices out of boxes--so much so that I'm too busy to leverage my tightly integrated end-to-end solution investment.
• "Improved ease-of-use"- Look, either something is easy to use or it's not. If you have improved a product so that it's easier to use but you don't want to imply that the earlier version was difficult to use, then say "We've improved this product and you'll find that it's even easier to use now." Saying something has "ease of use," is ridiculous anyway. That's like saying that a chair has "reduced hard of seat" or that a class is "difficult of study."
• "In concert with" - This is one of my jargon-loving colleague's favorites. He uses it to mean "together with" or just "with," as in "In concert with Oracle, we have built a database and server solution that offers optimized database administration and processing power." I immediately see, in my mind's eye, a company performing onstage at Red Rocks or Radio City Music Hall as an opening act for Oracle.
• "Optimize" and "optimization" - Although these are perfectly good words, they're misused to mean "improve" and "improvement," respectively. Optimize means to make something nearly perfect and since those offering optimized solutions are always optimizing them for the next release, then they're not nearly perfect.
• "Mission-critical" - The notion that every corporation must have a "mission" is an invention of the 1990s. I'm sure that when Henry Ford decided to start a company that manufactured cars, he didn't gather his managers and say, "Before one car rolls off the assembly line, I want a one-sentence statement that describes our company's goals so that I can put iton signs and on overhead projectors." Also, the notion that a company's mission is anything other than "To make a profit selling our products," is ridiculous. So are "mission-critical applications." If an application isn't going to help a company make or save money, then the company isn't going to use it. So, all applications are "mission-critical" because if they aren't, then no company is going to buy them.
• "Deliver" - The U.S. Postal Service delivers. UPS delivers. My software, on the other hand, does not deliver. Unfortunately, the rest of the world thinks that their software does deliver. In fact, it all "delivers reliability, availability, and scalability." However, when I open the software box, I don't see reliability, availability, or scalability anywhere.
• "Install," "spend," and "restore" used as nouns, as in "Perform the restore or, if that is not successful, locate the original disk and perform the install. If that doesn't work, you should plan to allot some IT spend to upgrading your hardware" - I have to wonder what's being taught in English classes in this era of No Child Left Behind. Do schools figure that because the President of the United States doesn't know a verb from a preposition that teaching children the different parts of speech isn't important anymore? What's next? Will we all "Perform the drive" when we get our cars out on the road? Or maybe we'll all "Perform the listen" with the songs on our iPod. My sister the artist can "Perform the paint" for her next show, and my brother can "Perform the read," as he studies for his next exam. My other sister is in the process of "performing the relax" in Maine or else she might join me as I "perform this complain."
• "Across" - This preposition is constantly being misused as a synonym for "all over" and "throughout." For example, I just edited a sentence in a book that says that a customer was thrilled that he could get information about his customers from across the enterprise. I wanted to find that customer and ask him how long it took him to walk across his enterprise and get it.
• "Transparent"- This is another abused word like "across." I see it in sentences like "This end-to-end solution gathers data from sources across the enterprise and delivers it in a single interface that is transparent to the end user." Isn't that cool? The "end user" can see right through that interface and into the inner workings of the computer and program. I have always wanted a "solution" that does that. Unfortunately, because there is no such "interface" available to the average customer, I know that what the solution actually does is gather the information from all kinds of places and put it into one screen or web page without the user having a clue that the information came from 100 databases and 28 servers that are located in 10 different countries.

After eight years of dealing with mission-critical applications and end-to-end solutions, I've had it. I can't take it any more. I am charged with editing some of the Web pages that advertise products sold by one of the biggest companies in the world and I'm slowly removing and replacing jargon with words that actually mean something. I'm hoping that this is a trend that continues.

Yep, my end-to-end solution for leveraging and optimizing marketing communications across the universe is to eliminate 21st-century jargon one page at a time.