I think the more reasonable standard might be this: if you wouldn't use a phrase or word in communication with your own colleagues, don't use it when talking to

I think the more reasonable standard might be this: if you wouldn't use a phrase or word in communication with your own colleagues, don't use it when talking to customers. If I got an email from a coworker talking about "synergies" and "visioning", I would likely reply with a direct and blunt request that they STFU and use real words. That being said, having worked for a company which prepared business training materials for online MBA programs, I can tell you that the use of weasel words is literally part of the curriculum for any biz-school-trained managers. It's up to us, the somewhat-business-savvy geeks, to gently steer them back in the direction of real communication. (At the same time, we should probably listen when they tell us that "EPIC DATABASE FAIL!" is not actually a good way to describe what happened in an outage report.)