Thursday, March 15, 2007

Bye bye brainstorm.

I never liked the term 'brainstorming' myself. It was made up by a manager somewhere to describe a process of random babble from which the enlightened could fool themselves into thinking they extracted brilliant new ideas.

However, like it or not, it became a term. It described something. I took part in one once and was amazed at how pointless it all was. I never did it again.

Even though I find the term silly, I had to groan at the news that 'brainstorm' is now a politically incorrect word. Apparently it might offend epileptics. Soon the language will be reduced to the words 'and', 'the' and 'it'. George Orwell's Newspeak is here.

So the silly term devised by management is no more. It's been replaced by the half-minds of the Politically Correct with a new, non-offensive term. I warn you to swallow anything that's in your mouth before I tell you what it is.

Thought Showers.

It's no less silly, but at least it does accurately describe the thin, wet thinking that goes on in those meetings.

Can I still say 'wet'? Or does it offend those who can't swim?

8 comments:

Scary Monster said...

You have got to be kidding?
This bee too moronic, even for me! and Me can be a pretty big moron at times.
Thought showers LOL. The "PC" crowd will have to shorten that soon enough due to the fact that they don't really have a thought floating around in thier heads in the first place.

You think they had a brainstoming session to come up with the term?

Romulus Crowe said...

Nope, the link is to a real news story. At the bottom you'll see they no longer allow 'nit-picking' because it originated during the slave trade. Hardly anyone knows that, of any skin colour, so it's difficult to see why they think anyone could be offended. They are actually hunting for words to ban. Their idiocy is well-researched idiocy. I think they want us to go back to caveman days and communicate with grunts and squeals.

You're right, they'll have to shorten it. Then they'll just be 'showers'.

Scary, compared to these people, you have no chance of being a moron. They have degrees in it. Nobody can compete.

Anonymous said...

Oh! they made it too simple.
How about:
Meandering Mental Minutiae

But then maybe 3M would complain!

Anonymous said...

When it comes to corporate catch phrases "real time" has always bothered me.

Real.

As opposed to Theoretical? or Fake?

But what if I want to chat in theoretical time??

Dr. Brainiac said...

Thought Showers? The Fundies over here would ban that term because it is too akin to Golden Showers. Why do those of with any shred of common sense allow these nitwits to continue bastardizing everything with which they come in contact?

Romulus Crowe said...

Jude - the PC are careful to avoid coming up against big businesses like that. It's too public. They work best as invisible entities on pointless committees. It's rare that anyone can point the finger and say 'That's the idiot who came up with this'.

Seeley - real time is what most of us live in. The PC are from another world so they might indeed work along different time scales. They're certainly not in this century. My own most-despised corporate word is 'paradigm'. Every time I hear it, I ask what it means. Nobody who's used it has yet been able to tell me, and I've never been interested enough in it to look it up.

DrSharna - Thought/golden showers, well, they are similar in that they both seem to consist of a streak of the same liquid.
The reason these morons get away with this is that they do it by committee. You can't isolate the one who came up with the stupid idea in the first place. They defend each other by shouting down the opposition, usually by defining anyone who disagrees with them as 'fascist', 'racist', or whatever vile term fits the nonsense they've come up with. Emotive words, and most will back down against the bile that issues from them.

There's an old saying - 'an empty vessel makes the most noise'. It fits the babbling PC crowd perfectly. I'm surprised they haven't commented here yet. If they do, I won't delete them, but I will provide an analysis of their comment.

astrologymemphis.blogspot.com said...

How do you find this stuff? I almost always leave here speechless, headshaking, or LMAO. What a bunch of dumb asses.

Romulus Crowe said...

Unfortunately, in the UK at least, stories like this are all too common.

The PC crowd's first action, long ago, was to make any kind of contact count as asault. So it's not as easy as it should be to slap them silly. You have to wear a mask.

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