Be of Good Cheer

Are you annoyed by people who:

• call cabinets “cabinetry”?
• try to show their commitment to sustainable design, referring to “Leeds”?
• say “nucular”, not “nuclear”?
• pronounce “accessible” as “assessable”?
• call columns “columes”?
• call masonry “masonary”?
• say “virtually” when they mean “actually”?
• say “literally” when they mean “figuratively”?
• think “irregardless” is a word?
• spell “fluorescent” as “flourescent”?
• call concrete cement?
• “reveal” their work on TV, without showing all the shortcut slipshod details?
• think “historical” is better than “historic”?
• have a tough “road” to hoe?
• ask ‘You know?”  at each breath?
• ask “You know what I mean?” after each statement?
• ask “You know what I’m sayin’?” after each explanation?
• say “Hey”, not “Hi” or “Hello”?
• think most things in life are “awesome”?
• capitalize their profession, but not others?

Well, then you too are a curmudgeon.  My current resolution is to, perhaps, be more forgiving.  Some people find me annoying.

Happy Holidays!

Excuse Me

  OR

Which one seems more like a belch?

So here I am, a consultant selling services to improve the management of your organization.  I even use the phrase "enterprise management" in the About Me byline of this blog.  It was as close as I was willing to get to the currently faddish acronym.

Wikipedia claims the Gartner group coined the term in 1990.  Actually, that's somewhat too long ago to fairly call it a fad.  I suspect, however, that it won't stick forever.  How much do we talk about TQM these days?

The name game is brought on us by those who want to have some way of characterizing what we do.  I have had marketing consultants tell me that I must reduce the description of my practice to no more than seven words.  This remains an on-going challenge.  I have yet to see that the reduction is warranted, but I'm working on it.

How's this: WWAD?  What would Arch do?  Ask me, and I'm going to tell you.  Assuming I think I know, of course.  I'll try to speak in plain english.  It's what I do.