What's in a word? A rose by any other name would be a thorny issue...

I was reading Kevin Gibbons blog at Econsultancy about 10 online marketing phrases that should be banned.

Phrases such as Brandscaping, Mindshare and Web 3.0. In fact I wouldn't just blame marketers for Web 3.0... you will find all manner of techie-geeks telling you that Web 2.0 is so old and Web 4.62 is the latest version... but of course it's all bollocks.

O'Reilly came up with the Web 2.0 term, but if he'd called it, instead, 'Social Internet', we might have been spared everyone trying to find what the next version will be.

And of course the next version won't be a huge jump. It will be a gentle evolution, as always, in the adoption of new technologies.

And, of course, most people are still in the dark as to what 'Web 2.0' means - thankfully - as it gives me a chance to present and teach on the topic.

Then I saw the link to Simon Rattray's 'Fluidblog' about marketing- and management-speak in general, with terms that rightly ought to be banned on pain of public flogging, such as: Blue Sky Thinking, Thinking outside the box and Pushing the envelope - to name but a few. I remember my first times in 'proper' business meetings in a 'proper' large company where people were using these terms. And I have to admit, I thought 'what a load of tossers'.

Another Econsultancy blog, this time by Chris Lake, also talked recently about PR-Speak in the same derrogatory tones, with terms such as: Leveraging, Synergy and, perhaps the worst of all, Paradigm shift. How many bloody trade fairs and seminars have I been to where someone has mentioned how the industry or the sector or their underpants are going through a 'paradigm shift'?

However, mea culpa mea culpa, I have been brainwashed and converted to the cause and now will even be known to say Keep me in the loop and Adding value... I blame the MBA personally. Not necessarily the MBA course I'm doing, but MBAs in general... and specifically the management 'gurus' who write the books and the theory that the MBAs have to learn and absorb.

To my shame I even used, this very morning, the terms 'leveraging relationships' and 'discuss synergies'! What a wanker!

But then the problem is that all language we use is suffused with vocabulary and influences from modern technology and literature. We listen to mp3s, not records (or gramophones). We zap the channels on TV, because we can... our parents or grandparents had to get out of their chair to change channels - and probably only had 2 to choose from anyway.

Even the term 'management-speak' is, of course, a reference to the 'newspeak' of George Orwell's 1984. But our language, unlike newspeak, is becoming richer, not poorer. We absorb words in English from every language such as Guanxi (Chinese), Sushi (Japanese), Entrepeneur (French) and Feckin' Eejit (George W. Bush)... and the problem with wealth is that sometimes it is badly spent. Not all the money goes on culture. It doesn't all go on self-improvement. Sometimes it goes on benchmarking and brainstorming.

So we will inevitably suffer fools, sometimes gladly, who misuse some phrases and overuse others, and we will even do it ourselves. For such is language. It is fluid. It grows. It moves, like a drunk with a limp, in mysterious ways.