Satiric radio commentary for the 90s from the man who drained Lake Michigan and filled it with hot chocolate!!!


Downsizing "Downsizing"

Stan Freberg here. Have corporate words like "downsizing" and "outsourcing" become overused? I hope so. The buzz is that these annoying phrases are being used less. Be right back. [:60 SPOT BREAK]

Freberg here. For a few years now, America's corporations, large and small, have taken to using euphimisms like "downsizing." Does that sound better than "We're firing a whole bunch of people?" Not to the person being downsized, it doesn't. Now word has it that "downsize" itself may be downsized as a word. Good!

And how about the non-word "outsourcing," meaning a company is going outside the company to have work done that used to be done inside the company? What was wrong with the term "farming it out"? But no, no...some yuppie exec came up with the term "outsourcing." Hopefully, that may soon be "farmed out" as a term.

Why do people always feel the language has to be changed or updated? For example, The Pentagon, in their infinite militaristic wisdom, sanitizes certain phrases. At some point, they started referring to "bombed-out areas" as "former meadows." And the Pentagon, in their updated war jargon, now refers to enemy human beings as "soft targets," while death itself has been renamed "a failure to thrive." You like that?

Until next time, this is the still-thriving Stan Freberg here.



Copyright ©1996, Stan Freberg/Freberg, Ltd. (but not very) Distributed by Dick Brescia Associates and Radio Spirits, Inc.