One of the benefits of leaving the IT business world and returning to school to study physics was that I no longer had to listen to BusinessSpeak (tm). If you’ve worked in business, you’ve heard it. That obscure English dialect spoken by MBAs and marketing-types, chock-full of words and phrases like synergy, vertical silos, powerbase, etc. (Newbridge Networks, I’m looking at you!)

It’s bad enough that these people take perfectly good English words and toss them together haphazardly in bastard sentences whose only purpose is to hide the fact that either:

a) the product is late, doesn’t work as advertised, or is so vapourware that the ideal gas law applies.

or

b) the speaker went on a gatorade and rum binge the night before and has no idea what they’re talking about.

No, it doesn’t stop there. What’s worse is when the BusinessSpeak folks invent a new word. Take webinar for instance.

According to Wikipedia:

A webinar is a specific type of web conference. It is typically one-way, from the speaker to the audience with limited audience interaction, such as in a webcast. A webinar can be very collaborative and include polling and question & answer sessions to allow full participation between the audience and the presenter. 

Now it’s obvious that webinar is fancy internet lingo for a seminar conducted over the web. Apparently, it was first used in 1998 and trademarked in 2000. But once all the other marketers heard the word, they started tossing it around too, and the trademark was eventually abandoned. These days it’s hard to find a company who doesn’t offer or participate in webinars.

So why does it bother me so much? Look at the word itself: web + seminar = webinar. So far, so good. But let’s look at the word seminar. From Webster’s Abridged Dictionary:

Sem`i*nar”\, n. [G. See Seminary, n.] A group of students engaged, under the guidance of an instructor, in original research in a particular line of study, and in the exposition of the results by theses, lectures, etc.; — called also seminary.

Dictionary.com has this to say about the origin of the word seminary:

[Origin: 1400–50; late ME: seed plot, nursery < L séminārium, equiv. to sémin- (s. of sémen) seed, semen + -ārium -ary]

So seminar is a seed plot or nursery. I can understand how that translates to the idea of a lecture, ie: planting a seed of an idea in somebody’s head. But that means that seminar is really a compound word of sorts. When we replace “sem” with “web” in webinar, we’re no longer talking about the seed of an idea, are we?

Let’s look up the -ary suffix, again using the Dictionary.com site:

The suffix has the general sense “pertaining to, connected with” the referent named by the base;

So, that means that the word webinar has nothing to do with learning now. Instead, at best it means “something to do with the web”. Descriptive no? That means that just about anything you put on the web can be considered a webinar! The FOX news website? A webinar! My vacation videos? Webinars! The entire content of Break.com? Webinars! Those Paris Hilton sex videos? Webinars!

The next time your boss catches you on Facebook or MySpace, tell them it’s OK, you were just participating in a webinar.