You might notice that this website is subtitled “A Paradigm of Synergy”. This phrase, if I remember correctly, was coined by Matt several years ago. He made slogans for himself, including “Matt Jankowski: A Paradigm of Synergy”. I then made several dozen slogans for him. I think these were deleted when I purged my computer of most of my old stories last year, as few of them were even remotely appropriate. Regardless, I enjoyed his description and pirated it for my site 6 odd years ago. It doesn’t actually MEAN anything. I epitomize the fusing things together in an amplifying way. Hmmm.
In an act that may well put entire business schools out on the street, the British have attempted to stifle the use of meaningless words. If you’re a useless person, how are you supposed to convince people that they should give you a job? French people speak French. Chinese people speak some variant of Chinese. Useless people communicate in the terminology of uselessness. It’s almost discriminatory.
I particularly enjoyed “thought showers”, not to be confused with “golden showers”, as a replacement for the already nebulous “brainstorming”. Apparently brainstorming could be insulting to those whose brains really are stormy, at no fault of their own. IBM recently attempted to standardize “ideating” is a synonymous buzz word.
While on the topic of words, a superior wordsmith has linked to a discussion that we had a few years ago on the phrase “pop a squat”. You might recall that Matt L invited Tim’s then girlfriend (Jo, who has now intermingled her DNA with Tim to generate this) to take a dump on his couch. She sat down, but never consummated the act, presumably out of a heightened sense of decency – we didn’t know each other well enough to defecate on the other’s couch at that point. Now she has no problem putting on a smock and whipping out the spigot for her baby. And he’s plenty comfortable with pooping wherever.
Congratulations to Bess for being christened world expert on the phrase “pop/cop a squat”. Way to go!
Words 
Another day, another Julia Roberts reference… man oh man.