From Ad Age: The Top Ten Gross Corporate Phrases of the Year

I love this.

In the past, a good friend of mine - "The Mongoose" - and I would kick our least favorite corporate terms back and forth. You know what I'm talking about, those phrases that people love to drop on teleconferences and insert in every section of every proposal they write.

Read: "table stakes" "soup-to-nuts" "let me socialize this internally" "it's part of a larger decisioning process". I mean, "decisioning"???

Anyway, this excellent list from adage.com (which is publishing a TON of top ten lists right now) caught my eye and was dead-on. Here's a sample, you can view all ten here.

CHOICEFUL
This means something, just not what most users think. The connotation, before it was embraced by business folk, was about making frequent and sometimes contradictory choices, i.e. being fickle. As such, it may secretly be an apt use of language. But deciders should use "decisive" to convey the intended meaning.

OPEN THE KIMONO
The image of corporate executives gently loosening and dropping their kimonos in advance of Geisha-like acts with one another is very disturbing. But it, too, may be secretly apt. The failure of so many deals suggests the due diligence described by this phrase focuses too much on the heat of the moment and too little on the morning after.

TOUCH POINTS
Here because it's so widely used and sounds so dirty, particularly in the context of many personal-care categories. But it may really be useful language because, unlike so many entries on this list, it describes something real, using fewer words or syllables than the alternatives. Even so, please keep your touch points inside the kimono unless asked otherwise.

THE NEW NORMAL
A catchall for the dismal post-Great Recessionary world. Let's face it, this feels normal to almost no one and good to even fewer people. In marketing, where rules and conditions of social media, mobile and other digital marketing evolve constantly, it's particularly meaningless. Or, maybe that's the ... new ... normal -- aieee!!!

MONETIZE
Besides not really being a word, it describes something that's often not a strategy. Its roots stretch to the dot-com era, where you lured traffic with free services, then figured out how to get paid. Many, notably those in print journalism, are still working on that last part. Then again, so is much of social media.