Talking to slides

Lucy Kellaway of Financial Times has just distributed the 2012 ‘Golden Flannel Awards‘ for ‘guff, cliché, euphemism and verbal stupidity‘. The winner of the Preposition Award is the innocuous word “to” as increasingly heard in presentations: “I’ve got some slides to talk to” – the unfortunate implication being that the speaker has to talk to the slides because no one else is listening. But rather than being ‘verbal stupidity’ I think this phrase simply accurately reflects our recent observations on slides becoming more important than people. On a more general note, I wish Lucy extended her awards from the corporate sector to academia. I am sure we academics can easily steal all those prizes from CEOs without PhDs. Which of the corporate reports would have anything matching the “disentangling intertwined social, economical and ecological resource governance challenges using a transdisciplinary systems approach“?

Advertisement

About Aleh Cherp

Aleh Cherp is a professor at Central European University and Lund University. He researchers energy and environment and coordinates MESPOM, a Masters course operated by six Universities.
This entry was posted in Presentations and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s