buzzword bingo

(BUZ.wurd bing.go) n. A word game played during corporate meetings. Players are issued bingo-like cards with lists of buzzwords such as paradigm and proactive. Players check off these words as they come up in the meeting, and the first to fill in a "line" of words is the winner.

Example Citation:

[In] cubicles and conference rooms at companies from annuity sellers to paper distributors, drones and peons are slyly mocking the new corporate culture — and their cliche-spouting bosses. One of their weapons is an underground game called buzzword bingo, which works like a surreptitious form of regular bingo. Buzzwords — "incent," "proactive, "impactfulness," for example — are preselected and placed on a bingo-like card in random boxes. Players sit in meetings and conferences and silently check off buzzwords as their bosses spout them; the first to fill in a complete line wins. But, in deference to the setting, the winner typically coughs instead of shouting out "bingo."

"Buzzword bingo arose as a reaction against half-truth and responsibility-dodging" in the workplace, says former Silicon Graphics Inc. software engineer Chris Pirazzi. When Mr. Pirazzi, now a software engineer elsewhere, worked at the hightech company, he wrote bingo cards featuring phrases like, "At Stanford, we . . ." (In Silicon Valley, it's hip to let people know you attended Stanford University.)

The game, by all accounts, began at Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, Calif. Tom Davis, a scientist and one of the company's founders, says that one day in early 1993, he was sitting in the office of a friend who had scrawled corporate-speak on his blackboard. A light bulb went off, and Mr. Davis wrote a computer program to generate bingo cards filled with the jargon he had seen, plus motivational cliches like "Step up to it." He says he coined the name "buzzword bingo" and passed the cards along to colleagues with a note written in the spirit of the new game: "The ball's in your court."
—Elizabeth Macdonald and Asra Q. Nomani, "Lots of Executives Become Fair Game ForBuzzword Bingo," The Wall Street Journal, June 8, 1998

Earliest Citation:

The Nation is not in total decline. Down in Silicon Valley, some high-tech workers have invented a subversive low-tech game called "buzzword bingo." Copies of buzzword bingo boards are all over the Valley, and two have been forwarded here from Sun Microsystems.

Here's how to play: Each person attending a business meeting takes different buzzword bingo boards, which look like regular bingo boards, but instead of numbers in each square, there are buzzwords. When one of the buzzwords is spoken at the meeting, players put a coin on its square. First one with a straight line wins.

The buzzwords in buzzword bingo include: "Whatever it takes," "Impact" (as a verb), "Win-win," "Scenarios," "Hot button," "Up to speed," "Bite the bullet," "Ball's in your court," "Pass the baton," "Functionality freeze," "Proactive," "State of the art," "Leading edge," and more, many more, as any meeting-goer could attest.
—Rob Morse, "Fun and games for the '90s," April 18, 1993

Notes:

How did buzzword bingo become so popular? After its invention in 1993, it remained a mostly underground phenomenon until 1994. Then the comic strip Dilbert (that dead-on deflator of business stupidity and pretentiousness) ran a strip in which one character offered another a "buzzword bingo" card as they were entering a meeting. He explained that if the boss uses a buzzword listed on the card, it gets checked off, and the goal, as in regular bingo, is to get five in a row. The game spread quickly after that, and when TheWall Street Journal ran a front-page story about the game in 1998 (see the example citation, above), and it became a full-fledged hit.

Buzzword bingo is appealing not only because most business meetings are deadly dull, but also because you get the feeling that most of the people spouting these buzzwords are doing it only to sound important. (That is, in fact, the definition of a buzzword: "An an often-used word or phrase that sounds more important than it really is, used primarily to impress other people.")