[thelist] OT (verbage)
Scott Johnson
owolf at advancenet.net
Thu Aug 17 00:34:01 CDT 2000
>The problem with the verb "to impact" is not its status as a word,
>but rather that it conveys very little information: "The new
>competitor's business model impacted our bottom line." Impacted how?
>The word, suffering from tremendous blandness, enjoys no true
>association in anyone's linguistic model. It would be more precise to
>say "The new competitor's business model _hurt_ our bottom line."
>
>That's the problem with most buzzwords. They're euphemisms.
Hmm, I always interpreted the word to be a superlative of "affected",
i.e., to say that something "impacted" something else is to say that it
"greatly affected" it. If you substitute the phrase "greatly affected"
into your example sentence I don't think it changes the intended meaning
and yet would you still say that it was 'vacuous'? Stating that
something "greatly affected" something else doesn't tell you how either
but I doubt it would raise as much disdain.
Scott Johnson
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