The 69 Words Banned By General Motors

In 2008 General Motors circulated an internal presentation listing 69 words that employees were banned from using.

It’s not the typical sort of list that you might see in a company’s brand voice guidelines or corporate communications playbook. This thing reads like the glossary for a horror novel.

Graphic words like ‘apocalyptic’, ‘mangling’, ‘grenadlike’ and ‘disembowling’ make the list. So too ‘Hindenberg’ and – bizzarly – ‘Cobain’. But seemingly benign words like ‘safety’ and ‘critical’ are off limits too.

In this episode James and Charles explain why the list was circulated in the first place, and try to make sense of the words on it. They also have a broader discussion about how companies use language as a form of control, and attempt to describe one of the worst examples of graphic design on a PowerPoint presentation ever seen.

View the PowerPoint slide from hell here: https://wankernomics.com/shownotes

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