The Great Digital Deluge

Forgive me, for I have sinned. I’ve used “secret sauce” and I need to take a long shower with sandpaper, maybe even bleach. It’s that dirty. What started as a lazy euphemism has become the gold standard for how we collectively lost our spine for real language. “Secret sauce” is just another fallen soldier in the war of verbal attrition, where originality got mowed down and replaced by lifeless jargon, spat out by humans and AI alike - like me, ironically.

Let us speak plainly, for we all have partaken in this fallen practice. In these days of digital deluge, scarcely can one traverse the vast scroll without gasping upon some threadbare phrase, hastily wrought from the infernal engines of an LLM - or worse, plucked by some hapless scribe who fancies himself Milton, cribbing the hollow words of a machine and dressing them in the vestments of false wisdom. “Secret sauce”? Indeed, how far we have FFAALLen. It is no more than the fetid dregs, the greasy residue left after a hundred LinkedIn algorithms devoured the fruits of real thought and spewed forth the same tired “personal brand“ drivel, clad in a cheap semblance of rhetoric, sent forth to perish in the boardroom.

And as in times of old, the scales hang heavy in the sky - like those which measured the fates of fallen angels - tilting ever toward mediocrity as originality is stripped bare. Even now, as the winds of Hurricane Milton churn across the land, one cannot help but feel the tempest is but a reflection of our own inner storm - an era where true language is ravaged by the hurricane of mindless repetition, and the heavens themselves seem to mock our descent.

And it’s not just that phrase. We’ve got a whole feast of mind-numbing drivel - “game changer,” “low-hanging fruit,” “moving the needle,” and the holy grail of empty promises: “let’s circle back.” Admit it. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve probably used “let’s circle back” when what you really meant was “I have no idea what’s going on, but I need more time to look busy.”

We’ve become parrots. Not even the cool, piratey ones - more like those plucked and down-trodden ones of Trafalgar Square. And then there’s the impending singularity. Somewhere along the way, someone handed out cheat codes for human interaction, and now we’re all pulling the content slot machine lever. Feed an LLM some vague prompt about “disruption,” and boom - out pops another meaningless jumble of syllables. The worst part? We take that soulless drivel and act like it’s some kind of revolutionary insight, fapping away at our own brilliance. We hit “post” like we just unlocked the secrets of the universe, when really, we just let a machine dump sludge on our behalf.

And don’t get me started on the word about overused words: “buzzword.” There, I said it. I just used that slimy discharge myself. How perfect. We’re so creatively bankrupt that we need a buzzword to describe buzzwords. It’s like complaining about junk food while pounding back fries and washing it down with soda. Here I am, using “buzzword” like it’s some profound revelation, when it’s just more mayo in the same bland corporate egg sandwich.

The real tragedy here? We’re losing the ability to say anything of value. Every post, every speech, every email reads like a Frankenstein’s monster of reheated, overcooked phrases mashed together by an algorithm that’s only slightly more coherent than a fortune cookie. And yes, I’m guilty too. I said “secret sauce.” I let the machine win. I handed over the keys to my brain and let it spew out the same empty calorie content as everyone else.

So here’s my point - let’s just call gobbledgook when we see it. Let’s stop letting these mindless phrases slip out of our fingers like we’re being paid to churn out meaningless syllables. And while we’re at it, let’s remember that originality isn’t dead just because AI can cobble together a halfway decent blog post. If we don’t stop the madness, then the “secret sauce” is going to ravage the Earth and keep tasting like corporate mayo forever - bland, sad, and entirely forgettable.

Welcome to a world of where the anti-prompt is three times longer than the prompt itself.

Somebody, please, circle back and save us from this verbal hell.

#buzzwordbingo #aioverload #corporatejargon #originalitymatters #stopthecliches #authenticity #contentfatigue