Technical Chinese: War room and word debris

War Room; Noun, masculineIt's nothing new that men have always liked to use war vocabulary in marketing. But in view of the global testosterone-fuelled political situation with figures such as Trump, Putin, Erdogan and Kim Jong-un at the helm of power, the buzzword "war room" seems completely out of place. For those who claim to have noticed a feminization of marketing and communication in recent years and were happy that the Mad Man was finally put out of business in this industry too, it seems a bit cynical. And yet suddenly there is talk of a war room everywhere in companies, as if there were a "war" for market share, with project managers acting like mini-generals and scoring points at meetings by calling for a war room. The buzzword gives even trivial projects a heightened sense of urgency and importance. But what does it actually mean? A war room is the place where commanders discuss strategies, make decisions and control military operations in the event of war. In a military context, the term is very old. The first time war room was used in a communications context was in 1992 during Bill Clinton's US election campaign. Four years earlier, the Democrats had taken a real beating from George W. Bush Senior and had to go over the books in terms of campaigning. It was Clinton's wife, of all people, who responded to the new campaign management's demand, "We need a team that gets up every morning and thinks nothing but: how do we fuck the competition?", by saying, "What you're asking for here is a war room, both the name and the attitude." Please, gentlemen in marketing and communication, you can do without it.Word debris; Noun, masculineAnyone who has ever had to sit through meetings involving several departments or companies or search for the core of a matter in project management tools or email-forward tapeworms knows what "spilling the beans" means. The noun "Wortschutt" refers to all superfluous words and phrases that serve neither the cause nor comprehensibility, but conversely are rather an expression of the author's helplessness.Wortschutt is usually so well mixed that no sorting or layering occurs and the listener or reader returns to their daily business, exhausted and clueless. If you want to gain new insights or even discover something new, you should therefore either refrain from using verbal debris or avoid it. Superfluous words accumulate in their entirety, like the material transported by glaciers in the Alps. They form imaginary moraines in meeting rooms, mailboxes or project management tools, which shape and paralyze entire projects, departments and companies. It then takes months or years for something fruitful to emerge. If word debris producers had this insight, they might get down to business faster.