In 2016 I wrote about a website called Guffpedia, a repository of dreadful corporate jargon. You see it everywhere: people driving agendas, moving forwards, using nouns as verbs….

This sort of awful English (if that’s what it is) festers in the PR world too. I receive tons of emails from PR companies who address me as “Hey”, tell me they are “circling back” and being over-familiar. Some of them even offer me “exclusives” on products in which I have no interest. More than that, I could not possibly have given them the impression I do.

Today I received a PR email with a difference though. It’s from PR person Hamish Thompson. He runs an online program called Buzzsaw. You enter some PR rubbish you received, copy and paste it into the text box, and then “buzz” it. The program will then work out how many jargon words or phrases have been used, and the copy’s “buzz factor”.

I tried it myself, by entering a load of nonsense. I made the text up, but it sums up quite a few of the PR emails I’ve received over the years! It’s good for a laugh, but you could also use it to test whether your intended PR message has a high buzz factor. As for what constitutes “high”, I should say any number above zero. I failed the test, because one of the entries is “In the time of Covid”. I’ve used that expression in the titles of some of my PhotoPrompt blog posts. On the plus side, I am delighted to announce that I have never used the phrase “the new normal”.

Hamish has compiled the best of the worst, in the Buzzsaw Awards 2020. All of the entries are cringeworthy, such as:

1. ‘Curated’. Judge’s comment: “A word that has been brutalised by Hipster culture.  Google practically anything – potatoes, burgers, you name it – and there’ll be a curated list somewhere in the world.  To make it worse, lists are often ‘carefully curated’, which is tautologous.”

2. ‘Content’. Judge’s comment: “Second only to the vacuum of space as the emptiest thing in the universe.  It’s like calling literature or journalism ‘words’.  It’s the high watermark in the commoditisation of writing.”

3. ‘Disambiguate’. Judge’s comment: “A word that rather cleverly obscures the thing it seeks to clarify.  Like spraying mud on windows to clean them.”

Unfortunately, the overall effect of lazy, bad writing is to somehow deaden the language. It’s not possible to read many PR emails or too much of a company’s “mission statement” or end-of-quarter announcement without finding yourself unable to think. Even the Department for Education in England makes announcements that are indistinguishable from corporate gobbledygook. Websites like Buzzsaw and Guffpedia perform a valuable service in identifying examples of “diseased English”.

On a related matter, read the “How not to do PR guide”. It’s full of examples of bad practice, including actions like sending emails without any consideration for the recipient’s (likely) target market, and following up emails. (I sometimes receive an email, followed by another email to see if I received the first one, followed by a message left on Skype followed by a call to my mobile. Had I, in my younger days, pursued a young lady in this sort of fashion, she would have asked me why I have’t taken the hint that she wasn’t interested. Either that, or sought a court order against me for harassment.

Enough of this wittering! Go and read the Buzzsaw Awards 2020, and have a laugh.