Buzzword  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

A buzzword (also fashion word and vogue word) is a vague idiom, usually a neologism, that is common to managerial, technical, administrative, and political work environments. Although meant to impress the listener with the speaker's pretense to knowledge, buzzwords render sentences opaque, difficult to understand and question, because the buzzword does not mean what it denominates, yet does mean other things it ought not mean. George Orwell, in "Politics and the English Language," wrote that people use buzzwords because they are convenient. It is much easier to copy the words and phrases that someone invented than it is to come up with one's own.

See also

• Ambiguity – Type of uncertainty of meaning in which several interpretations are plausible
• Buzzword compliant – Suggests product supports fashionable features
• Catchphrase – Phrase or expression recognized by its repeated utterance
• Law of the instrument, also known as Golden hammer – cognitive bias
• Hype cycle
• Marketing buzz
• Corporate jargon, also known as Marketing speak
• Memetics – Study of self-replicating units of culture
• Power word
• Pleonasm – Redundancy in linguistic expression
• Psychobabble
• Virtue word
• Weasel word – Words or phrases using vague claims