The new wave of corporate pollution

It's not too tough to spot a canned quote in a newspaper. The media relations staffers who write press releases, especially those that are in-house employees rather than an outsourced PR firm, often have the keenest ability to put words in a CEO's mouth that one would hope would never come up in regular conversation.

Yes, in almost every case, it's better to just paraphrase, but some writers and editors just can't shake that dependence to get some sort of quote in every story. That's why you might be reading an otherwise well-written story and then hit a clunker paragraph of PR speak. Like this (to be fair, I picked something out of one of my news stories of yore):

Flaring is a fundamental part of the safety measures at our hydrocarbon facilities. We are working to reduce the need for flaring and to minimize the impact of flaring on our community.

If the writer is worth his salt, this will be identified as a prepared statement or such. If not, he's trying to pull a fast one on the editor and/or the readers, trying to trick them into thinking he interviewed the CEO of ExxonMobil when he really just did a few quick cut-and-paste moves from a press release.

Or so I thought, until I got more and more entrenched in business writing. That's when I found out the horrible truth: People really do talk like that. I've found myself transcribing conversations so drained of any personality that Meryl Streep couldn't give them a convincing reading.

It's not too hard to figure out why, of course. Misspeak to a journalist, and the whole world could potentially see that you're an idiot. People, including formal journalists, making a living training the corporate world how to speak to the media, avoiding the dreaded "would not comment," but still saying nothing.

The bigger problem is: Some people don't know when to turn that off. They'll describe a football game with the same dryness as a quarterly earnings report. It's bad enough that corporate buzzwords like proactive and "out of the box" have crept into our language, but this guarded speak is even worse. It's further deriving words and phrases of their meaning.

Example: Someone I talked to recently was touting "exponential growth" in his company. I looked at the numbers. They grew by about 200 percent one year and by about 100 percent the next. Impressive growth, yes, but not exponential. In order to be exponential, the rate in the second year would have had to be larger than the first. Yet another word sucked dry by the same vampires who killed "hopefully" and "at the end of the day."

I used to find William Safire's weekly language column the most pretentious, irritating thing to ever appear in a newspaper. God help me, now I'm turning into him. I just hope that doesn't make Bill Clinton want to punch me.