The corporate attorney will huff, puff, and then put you to sleep with sentences that are over a page long.  Why does he do it?

“Notwithstanding,” preposition, in spite of.  Usage note:  There’s really only one type of person who uses this word in conversation:  An obnoxious prig who’s desperate to show everyone how smart he is, to wit:  “I must say, notwithstanding his B- in AP Latin, our son Ransford should probably squeak his way into Yale.”  It takes an unself-aware smart person to use this word correctly but not realize how painful it sounds.  Then again, someone who’d make the above statement just might enjoy coming across as unbearable.  One can get away with using the term more easily in print, but corporate attorneys- those who help investment bankers write registration statements, bond indentures, etc- have completely overdone it; they’ve fetishized the term.  When writing, they spit it out like a nervous tic, they use it as often as a gum-cracking Valley Girl says “like” or her twin brother says “brah.”  Here’s an example:  In First Data Corporation’s 143-page credit agreement, which is the legal document that sets forth the restrictions placed on the company by its bank lenders, “notwithstanding” appears 40 times; at one point, it shows up twice in the same sentence.

Why do the corporate shysters do it?  Why do they choose to subject readers of financial documents to such windbaggery?  When asked, Pierre Beauregard, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Lost Cause Institute at the University of the Confederacy, who has written extensively on the strange and unhealthy love-hate relationship between investment bankers and the corporate attorneys who bill them, had an interesting explanation: Continue reading →

The mushroom treatment: Keep them in the dark, feed them (bull)shit, and then can ’em if necessary.

“Mushroom treatment,” noun phrase, a managerial style that involves handling employees the way most people think that mushrooms are grown:  keeping them in the dark (ie, uninformed), occasionally feeding them (bull)shit (ie, disinformed), and then canning (ie, firing) them if necessary.  Also “to mushroom,” verb, to administer the mushroom treatment.  Usage note:  Within the world of investment banking, those heartless enough to have what it takes to stick around quickly learn to give the mushroom treatment to those below them in the hierarchy (the truly brash also give the treatment to peers).  When a vice president learns that a client meeting has been postponed from next Monday to next Wednesday, will he give the associate below him a break and kindly inform him that he won’t need to work over the weekend?  Of course not; he’ll opt for one of the oldest tricks in the banker book, the false deadline. Continue reading →