Alumni Futures‘ Andy Shaindlin points to a Reuters report about the most annoying words in the blogosphere (blogosphere is among them) and wonder what the most annoying words in the advancement business might be. His two nominees — “friendraiser” and “funraiser” — have got to be pretty annoying for an alumni guy. (I’d never heard of alumni staff being referred to as “funraisers,” but I have heard the term “the punch and cookies people” applied to them, and boy would that honk me off.)
From my perspective as a PR and marketing guy, the word I most disdain is “spin.” It boils my blood when people refer to me or our staff as “spin doctors” or “spinners,” and refer to our work as “spin.”
Most annoying phrase I hear (though thankfully, not so much anymore): “best-kept secret.” As in, “UMR is the best-kept secret in higher education.” The implication is usually that it’s the PR or marketing shop’s fault, because we aren’t “spinning” about our campus enough.
Sometimes, the word “advancement” annoys me, too. I’m not sure why. It just does.
How about you? What words most annoy you? leave a comment here or on Andy’s original post.
Andy writes! 
I just hate when any company refers to them self as “the best” or “the #1”
According to who is what I want to ask them.
One of my least favorite words in higher ed is “excellence.” It’s been so overused and underexplained that it means nothing. It’s a prime example of fluff in writing.
Nathalie – A lot of us deal with the whole “ranking” issue in our PR/marketing jobs. Avis (the rental car company) did a nice job by flipping the ranking idea on its ear with its “we try harder” ad campaign of several years back. Our university has a stated goal of becoming a “top 5 technological research university,” but there’s a slight problem. There’s no third party that ranks technological research universities. U.S. News ranks engineering schools, but our definition of TRU differs from U.S. News’ “engineering school” definition.
Lori – Good point. (I almost said “excellent” point.) Again, this hits home for me. Our capital campaign is called, “Advancing Excellence.” :)