Microsoft PowerPoint
There is no novel, no play, not acerbic letter — no creative thought of any substance at all — has ever first put its squealing voice in the cupped ear of the world only but for the ministry of Microsoft PowerPoint.
PowerPoint is the market-standard software package for dressing up fatuous ideas with profundity. On it, one generates “decks”. A deck is a form of animated presentation one inflicts on powerless underlings in order to promise much and deliver little. In the hands of an individual gifted in the magic of middle management, PowerPoint can turn base metal into fool’s gold.
But you knew that already. More interesting is PowerPoint’s central role in the development of the modern business dialect, management speak. PowerPoint’s linguistic foundation comprises not just the traditional Roman alphabet but a supplemental lexicon of wingdings, pull-outs, bullets and animated transitions through which one can communicate in ways previously alien to the Indo-European tradition. This makes management speak a sort of base sixteen to ordinary English’s decimal; an illegitimate off-spring of our historical linguistic traditions and perhaps the first genuinely new dialect to emerge since the Latin five thousand years ago.
Adeptness at PowerPoint, the willingness to tinker around to get snappy slide transitions and the like, is a core skill of an aspiring middle manager (and a quick way to pick up the fundamental syntax of this new idiom).