The language of (forgive us) change, as p&t enters the digital age.

One of the great things about working in the of fice instead of at home—aside from the computer support (no, really)—is the relatively easy access to my fellow editors, who are on the same corridor and just around the corner. This being the 21st century, we have multiple methods of communicating with one another, depending on the circumstances—if the loud non-editors have taken over the hallway and we editorial types want to keep our doors closed, there is the interoffice phone and/or e-mail. When the hallway is relatively quiet and we feel like being more sociable, or if we happen to bump into one another at the printer, the conversation periodically degenerates into a contest to see who received the worst manuscript, letter, or press release. I can guarantee that it will not be the one with the most typos or the dangling modifiers, although they are frequently serious contenders. No, the worst piece of writing is the one with the most public relations jargon (e.g., offering “solutions” to problems you don’t have) and cor porate clichés, many of which involve turning perfectly good nouns like impact, money, partner, trend, and leverage into verbs—all of which we despise. Sometimes the users of the Supremely Annoying Phrases (SAPs), as I call them (I just made that up), borrow the most irritating words from one another’s vocabulary and inject them into their own limited lexicons. For example, not a day goes by that we don’t all receive a press release announcing the merger of two companies, at least one of which will have some tangential association with pharmacy. These releases, I have learned, are not allowed to go out the door unless they contain a sentence, usually a quotation from the CEO of one of the companies, that goes something like this: This strategic alliance truly leverages the core competencies of our two organizations.