[Editor’s Note: Worst Word of the Week is a regular GeekWire feature spotlighting the pretentious, unnecessarily complex, buzzword-laden, imprecise-but-precise-sounding language that plagues the tech industry. Read our introductory post for more background.]
This week’s worst word: Next-generation
Examples of (mis)use: I’ve heard this sad, tired phrase freely applied to cars, to cellular service, and of course to pretty much every piece of software ever written.
What it means: First of all, very few products or services can truly be said to have generations. I’m not even sure I believe in the concept of generations at its most generic, for example as applied to human beings. Sure, there are differences among people all born during a certain period, created by the events that befell them. But is it fair and accurate to say that people grouped by birth year experience life the same way?
Regardless, an already slippery concept loses all meaning in the software industry. For the most part, there simply are no generations to be “next” after. The term is just another way of trying to say “advanced.”
Yes, cellular service may be an exception, though no average consumer could begin to explain what one “generation” of service offers over the one purportedly about to end.
Why it’s the worst: As is the case with so many WWW choices, “next-generation” is just one of those phrases that we’ve all read a million times and so type almost reflexively. But it begs to be eliminated. Why not just call something “advanced”? And follow that with an explanation, in nice clear English, of what makes it advanced – why it’s clearly better than its predecessor. That’s what readers (and reporters) want to know. Details, details! Much of the rest is disposable verbiage. In the software industry, the main story always seems to be (1) what problem the software (or, these days, service) addresses, (2) how it fixes it, and (3) how it does so faster and better than whatever else is out there and/or whatever came before. But that has to be proved.
Does anyone staring at a blank screen composing a press release (or, shamefully, a news story) believe that readers pay attention to or even notice the phrase “next-generation”? It’s just written throat-clearing, superfluous junk that the eye learns to skip over very quickly.
But not quickly enough, alas, to avoid an internal groan over the reflexive use of empty phrases and the lack of bold, fact-packed prose so very common in this industry.
I’ve got the emotional bandwidth to hate other words, so feel free to submit your favorite candidate to tips@geekwire.com. Don’t expect to see it here any time soon, though. There’s too much material I’ve already collected that’s making me seethe.
