It’s Frankenspeak Friday! (Are You Scared Yet?)Posted 5 years ago by Ann Handley | 4 Comments
Today is Frankenstein Friday — an event that celebrates the birth of the famous freak. We’re co-opting the holiday to celebrate our favorite kind of related monster, Frankenspeak.
Frankenspeak is convoluted text that doesn’t sound like it was spoken by a human, but instead sounds like it was created in a laboratory. Sometimes it reads like someone bolted-on words to create a terrifying string of nonsense (“our mission-critical, scalable, high-performance, unparalleled, game-changing solution”) or bloated bit of buzzwords. Either way, it’s sales-y language and useless marketing hype.
C.C. and I wrote about the words and phrases that we’d like to ban from marketing, sales, corporate communications, business schools, blogs and boardrooms in the book. But since today is a day to celebrate the scary, here’s to Frankenspeak!
Happy Frankenspeak Friday!