Talknormalists unite!

“Blue skies thinking” “low-hanging fruit” “Ballpark” “Elevator pitch” – every day media parlance or triggers for national irritants of the year? For one man, such buzzwords (itself a ‘buzzword’) begin such an internal simmer that he has been moved to write a book about it.
According to journalist Tim Philips whose book ‘Talk Normal’ will be published September 3rd we can lay the blame for what he considers inanities firmly at the door of the dotcommers. Apparently such maxims peaked during the early noughties.
‘Talk Normal’ is based on Philips blog talknormal.co.uk. Over a 20 year career he has formed a deep aversion to bad spokespeople – the evasive answers, jargon filled quotes, question dodging and what he terms as the ‘inability to make a point’. Philips sees this as a deepening phraseology kerfuffle (he has a deep aversion to the overuse of ‘crisis’) with the now ubiquitous company spokesperson.
In answer he launched talknormal. The blog attempts to find out if spin and management speak can be dispensed with and ‘we can talk like normal human beings’. James Murdoch is cited as a prime example.
According to talknormal, ‘Antitalknormalists’ use the Matter of Regret (MoR) when they are nominally in charge and bad things happen. Citing James Murdoch’s usage recently before the MPs committee – apology quickly became a “matter of great regret’’.
The blog itself takes a humorous look at media language, Government speak and generally despairs at all. The three principles of Talk Normal are 1) Try to be understood by everyone who’s listening, 2) Stop trying to sound clever for no reason, 3) It’s about attitude, not rules.
Philips has created funny analytics such as the TN Joy Index – by taking the numbers of articles that mention the word “joy”, and dividing them by the number that mentioned the word “gloom”.
Naturally, here in OWL Marketing we are avid talknormalists. Not a buzzword to be found in our advertising patter, PR spiel or marketing lingo. Promise!