Driving home today I fell in behind a pickup truck sporting a homemade bumper sticker composed of individual stick-on letters:
drafting is not an act its an art winston salem cars are not apart
Was the pickup's owner asking to be tailgated by a better class of driver? Probably not, but that seemed to be the sense of the word salad he'd composed.
That bumper sticker made me think of those ExecuSpeak vision statements you see on office walls: "Committed people advantaging our Clients interest's," that sort of thing.
When corporate bigwigs display their ignorance of English wise underlings check their tongues. Politically savvy underlings force the words to make sense by advantaging everything they can get their hands on.
The USAF has its own blue-suited corporate leaders, of course, and consequently its own ExecuSpeak. In my day, "having visibility over" projects and processes was the rage.
I don't know who coined "having visibility over" but am willing to bet it was a senior leader. Like this: a three-star tells a one-star he wants to have visibility over some project the lower-ranking general's division is working on, meaning that he wants to micro-manage the project by knowing everything that's going on as it's happening. The lower-ranking general, in turn, demands visibility over the project from his colonels; the colonels demand it from the majors, and so on down in classic military fashion. Unit vision and strategy statements are rewritten to embrace the concept of having visibility in all directions: downward, upward, and lateral. Two years later the three-star retires, visibility is replaced by transparency, and down come all the posters.
During visibility's heyday I refused to use the word in any sense other than the meterological (i.e., if the visibility at my planned destination is less than three miles I must list an alternate destination on my flight plan). ExecuSpeak made my skin crawl. It still does.