> Lucy Kellaway does a wonderful parody of this style in her weekly
> Martin Lukes column in the Financial Times <http://www.ft.com/comment/
> columnists/martinlukes> - the only serial epistolary fiction I know
> of, in email form. The protagonist, Lukes, is chief great leader of a-
> b global UK, a conglomerate whose product is unclear. He's alwoys
> "diarising brainbangs" with his staff, offering "thought showers" and
> "mind bullets" to colleagues, and coining neologisms like Creovation
> and Integethics. His latest scheme is to make a-b global UK carbon
> neutral, and he's trying to diarise a brainbang with Richard Branson
> and Nicholas Stern to help that happen.
The large hi tech company I work for is rife with this. I went to a meeting yesterday where my boss' boss' boss came to speak. Every single thing he said was a cliche. But this to me so is not so much proof that he is lying as that 1) once you get that many layers away from reality, you have fewer real things to talk about and 2) it is much easier to lie with cliches. Even I, in a corporate setting, find cliches coming down like snow and blurring all boundaries when I open my mouth. I have to stay very alert to keep this from happening.
Joanna