Corporations complicate through simplification
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The bigger they get, the less corporations use full sentences. Companies begin to develop a language of their own based on their internal processes and acronyms, wherever they can use them. AT&T and Microsoft are two companies that use acronyms to simplify and business speak to complicate. They have their own lingo, that to an outsider, sounds like a foreign language.
AT&T Operator Services, [AOS], a dinosaur from an earlier age, replaced by voice-recognition technology [VRT], designated a busy line as being “by” [B.Y.]. Why not just say it was a busy line? It is just as simple and takes no more time to say “The line was busy”, than to say, “the line was by”. I never heard anyone question why this silly acronym was used. This was Ma Bell, you didn’t question Ma Bell, the Telco [telephone company].
MBS GP, [Microsoft Business Solutions, Great Plains] is accounting software. This and anything else Microsoft can shorten down to an acronym helps simplify [complicate] the language of the corporate environment. Inside the walls of “the corporation”, I first heard the word “verbage” which is, in fact, incorrect usage of a different word. It should be verbiage. Corporations use “verbage” in sentences such as, “we must use the correct verbage to relate our business policies to our customers.” The correct word, according to Webster, is “verbiage”. Verbiage means: The use of many words without necessity, or with little sense; a superabundance of words; verbosity; wordiness. Confused? Welcome to business speak.
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