GM Hands over List of 69 Abolished Words in Light of Recalls
June 16, 2014
The massive amount of recalled GM cars in 2014 is discussed in the article The 69 Words GM Employees Can Never Say on AOL Jobs. As part of the settlement with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, GM was forced to hand over the list of terms that they abolished from their employees’ vocabulary. It is an odd list, ranging from sensible words to avoid like “problem” and then the more colorful “grenadelike” and “Kevorkianesque” appearing later. John Oliver also had some fun with this list recently, wondering if at some point it simply became an exercise in free association? The article reports,
“The company was trying to tell engineers how to document problems – uh, make that issue, condition, or matter, according to the agreement – with cars as part of the recall process. These were words that were not supposed to be used in memos, emails, or presentations, lest they come back to haunt the company. As they have…You might wonder just how bad things looked to the engineers, given that this would be an odd collection of words…”
The article also mentions the astounding fact that the brake light issue was apparent as early as 2008, right around when the list was put together. So not so much prescience as knowing negligence. Or perhaps it was just a way to simplify search, since obviously you can’t search for a word if it does not appear in the corpus.
Chelsea Kerwin, June 16, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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