Mail & Guardian reporter
Employees who are fed up with the nonsensical vocabulary and endless meetings of the modern workplace have found a way to undermine both with a new pastime: Buzzword Bingo.
Instead of numbers, bingo cards are filled with the platitudes of business speak – terms such as “add value”, “going forward”, “synergy”, “win-win” and “branding” – which are marked off as they are unwittingly called during a meeting. The winner is the first to get a row, a diagonal, or all four corners, and is expected to jump up and scream: “Bingo!”
The beauty of the game is that it adds value to attention-challenging powwows. It can even be played alone in front of the television. Following a recent Dilbert cartoon and a front- page article in the Wall Street Journal, it’s sweeping the United States workplace.
The game is popular at Microsoft and is played at Nasa, according to Benjamin Yoskovitz, who runs and is writing a book about the phenomenon.
Yoskovitz says Nasa employees “have played several games … and the pot has risen to a whopping $8”. Nasa buzzwords include “take offline” (to discuss a point in private after a meeting) and “tall pole” (a rocket), says Yoskovitz.
Buzzword Bingo first came to public attention in 1996 after US Vice- President Al Gore delivered an address to students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the time, Gore was hyping the “information superhighway” and peppered his speeches with a lot of technical buzzwords. He was alerted to the prank beforehand and asked, “Did I say a buzzword?” when a commotion broke out in the crowd.
Invention of the game has been attributed to Tom Davis, an engineer at Silicon Graphics, who, in 1993, wrote a program that generated Bingo cards. However, it’s likely the game was floating around the ether for some time before that.
A variation surfaced at the World Cup: players on the England team had a bet going to see who could mention the most song titles during interviews.
There are dozens of Buzzword lists on the Internet as well as Web pages that automatically create Bingo cards, for example:
; or . A version for the Palm Pilot can be found at .