Wither goes this mangled apparition?

I hate buzzwords and stupid terminology. It partly drove me out of my job teaching English at a business college in Shanghai: it seemed particularly hypocritical to claim to be teaching English to Chinese people while massacring it behind closed doors with barbarous business neologisms. We were as bad as a bunch of womanizing monks. For instance, our teaching trainers would tell us: “We don’t give feedback, we prefer to give ‘feed-forward.'” Whereas I think that as long as we’re making shit up, a word like ‘feed-forward’ would more accurately describe a bird ingesting some seeds or berries and then vomiting them up again into the mouths of its babies. Although I suppose that’s more or less what we were doing too. Of course it’s worse in politics, since the power is greater and the ends are generally worse, and where euphemisms represent the most frustrating concealment of reality other than the bikini. For instance, this horrible new phrase ‘the public option.’ Were I to guess, I would have imagined that ‘the public option’ referred to when a guy can’t find a girlfriend but is still wants to have sex, so he chooses the ‘public option.’ And naturally I imagine that in today’s liberal America when a mission goes wrong in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever the soldiers will no longer abort it, they will “exercise a woman’s reproductive rights” on it.

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