Brainstorm
It was a couple of years ago, I think, when I was first told not to use the term ‘brainstorm’. I was freelancing at some public sector organisation. I remember the deputy managing editor of the website telling me that the word ‘brainstorm’ is offensive to epileptics and I laughed uproariously – thinking this was some very witty joke – only to realise a moment later that no one else was laughing and that this bloke was being serious.
I realised that I’d made a terrible mistake but couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the joke was on me. Perhaps the whole team were ganging up on the freelancer – that’s not so unusual in my experience. Perhaps they weren’t really editorial staff, but conspirators in disguise plotting to make fools of all of us by making us diligently replace the word ‘brainstorm’ with ‘thought shower’ in every piece of copy that passes through our pcs.
I did my research and I must say, thank God for the British press! You can always rely on them to report the stories that don’t really matter. ‘The Sun’ and ‘the Metro’ were so outraged by this “political correctness gone mad” that I knew this was nothing to laugh about.
And as for ‘thought shower’. Talk about a term that has never really caught on!
Even on the internet people shun the thought of a ‘thought shower’. I think it’s the ‘shower’ part that puts people off. It conjures up images of being naked with your colleagues in a dank prison shower. I even shudder as I write about it.
So you’ll find that Business Dictionary has a definition for ‘brainstorming’ but not ‘thought showering’.
And type ‘thought shower’ into the search engine at Wikipedia and you will be redirected to ‘brainstorm’. Surely that is significant. Could it be that the collective common editorial sense of the English speaking world is using the internet to fight back against the conspirators?
I was at a meeting the other day where a manager suggested we brainstorm. After all this time minding my language, I, like everyone else in the room, stared back at her with a look of shock at her brazen callousness. She then explained that we can use “that word” now – it is no longer considered offensive.
