I admit, we PR people tend to beat around the bush and to butter things up (love these English terms!), i.e. the opposite of straight talk. Personally, I try to spot and eliminate empty phrases in PR texts whenever possible but I’m sure I’m guilty of more than an occasional “innovative solution” or “next-generation”.

What John Gruber does here, translating an internal memo from Yahoo!’s Jerry Yang into plain English, is a bit mean, but just a bit. In essence, it appeals to us PR folk not to take our audiences for fools and that’s a good thing to take away from a little mean post. I especially love this one:

“today we launched zimbra 5.0, a next generation e-mail and collaboration suite that’s a great milestone in our open platform and starting point strategies.

Zimbra will be the first product taken out back to be shot in the head once the Microsoft takeover goes through.“

(via Mediacoffee)