Thursday 11 October 2007

What to do in boring meetings... Play Buzzword Bingo

This is from the site Wordspy. They have the coolest words there. Many of the words on the site are neologisms and portmanteaus. (Sheebee likes portmanteaus - she makes up her own words by combining two or more )
  • BUZZWORD BINGO (BUZ.wurd bing.go) n. A word game played during corporate meetings. Players are issued bingo-like cards with lists of buzzwords such as paradigm and proactive. Players check off these words as they come up in the meeting, and the first to fill in a "line" of words is the winner. Example Citation: [In] cubicles and conference rooms at companies from annuity sellers to paper distributors, drones and peons are slyly mocking the new corporate culture — and their cliche-spouting bosses. One of their weapons is an underground game called buzzword bingo, which works like a surreptitious form of regular bingo. Buzzwords — "incent," "proactive, "impactfulness," for example — are preselected and placed on a bingo-like card in random boxes. Players sit in meetings and conferences and silently check off buzzwords as their bosses spout them; the first to fill in a complete line wins. But, in deference to the setting, the winner typically coughs instead of shouting out "bingo." "Buzzword bingo arose as a reaction against half-truth and responsibility-dodging" in the workplace, says former Silicon Graphics Inc. software engineer Chris Pirazzi. When Mr. Pirazzi, now a software engineer elsewhere, worked at the hightech company, he wrote bingo cards featuring phrases like, "At Stanford, we . . ." (In Silicon Valley, it's hip to let people know you attended Stanford University.) The game, by all accounts, began at Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, Calif. Tom Davis, a scientist and one of the company's founders, says that one day in early 1993, he was sitting in the office of a friend who had scrawled corporate-speak on his blackboard. A light bulb went off, and Mr. Davis wrote a computer program to generate bingo cards filled with the jargon he had seen, plus motivational cliches like "Step up to it." He says he coined the name "buzzword bingo" and passed the cards along to colleagues with a note written in the spirit of the new game: "The ball's in your court."—Elizabeth Macdonald and Asra Q. Nomani, "Lots of Executives Become Fair Game For Buzzword Bingo," The Wall Street Journal, June 8, 1998

Also check the site for "The Streisand Effect" and "Corridor Cuiser"

4 comments:

SheBee said...

Ooh - link love, i liiiike!

Yes, making up words is part of who I am, plus its entertaining for everyone.

I have also decided that I am on a mission to find the worlds coolest pet - a hippocrocodonkeyrat.

LOL.

Sweets said...

i think its' great...bingo it is then...my next meeting starts in an hour...lol!

The Divine Miss M said...

Oh that's brilliant! Must remember that for next big meeting. In fact we have a departmental one tomorrow. Hmm ... wonder if it is too late to rally for it?!

AngelConradie said...

bucking frilliant!!! i coulda used this at my old job!!!