#1187 Windbag Words

Recently I went to a conference conducted by younger representatives from the world of policy development. It was fun to hear the new types of bureaucratic speech.
And hey, this was an energy conference, so why not have some new examples of windbags.
We all know language evolves. The other day I was listening to an old song from the 70s and the singer sang, “and that’s a natural fact.” Nobody ever says something’s “a natural fact” any more.
So it’s no surprise the young presenters at the conference had a lingo of their own. When they talked about an emerging idea they’d say, “Well okay, now we can begin to see what this looks like.” “This is a good direction here, so let’s see what that looks like.”
Instead of just telling us the ideas, they kept warning us an idea was coming by telling us we were going to begin to see what it looked like. I, for one, would rather begin to understand it, but I don’t come from the PowerPoint era.
And by the way, next time I go to a presentation and watch the speaker read off a PowerPoint word for word, I think I’ll ask for the slides and leave. I can usually read it faster and better anyhow, and there is something really creepy about reading along with the presenter.
It’s like some horrifically distorted version of a hootenanny sing-along. Let’s all read together and look at pictures.
Back to the young folks. They also said, after we saw what something looked like, that we were going to create a conversation about it. “Now that we’ve begun to see what this looks like, we can start to create a conversation about it.”
I’d rather just talk. Creating a conversation seems so wordy.
In contrast, they also used a new word that was quite short. Instead of saying they were going to figure out a way to incentivize something, they said they were going to incent it. As in, “We are going to incent fuel-switching behaviors.”
Like a combination of incentivize and incite.
Personally, I would have liked to incent them to sharpen up their language skills.
And that’s a natural fact.
America, ya gotta love it.