As I lay in bed last Monday morning listening to the radio, there was someone on BBC One talking to Chris Moyles about going camping with the Beckhams. I asked aloud “Who goes camping with the Beckhams? (I also meant, the Beckhams go camping?). I then heard someone say “It’s Gordon Ramsay” from the other room, and I replied that I didn’t recognise his voice because he’s not swearing.

I have had limited exposure to Gordon Ramsay outside of his “Kitchen Nightmares” franchise, where his favourite language of choice is profanity and where he displays an unwavering passion for food and cooking. On the radio, Ramsay was plugging his new book, as well as the new grill at the Savoy, where radio host Chris Moyles was very upset at the fact that they wouldn’t be serving chips. Ramsay also spent a very long time talking about his £110 truffle pizza at Maze.

After being hurt fairly badly in the recession, and even before the recession, he seems to be continuously beating his drum like the energiser bunny, who keeps going and going and going. He has been selling off restaurants and rights to telly programs to remain profitable.

What is he up to now, and how are these new ventures going to save him?

What is Ramsay’s competitive advantage? Well he’s not leading a food revolution like Jamie Oliver, no in fact he is trudging forward in the fine dining market. Even www.gordonramsay.com is pointed in the right direction, with the title reading “Fine Dining in London”. You don’t get more specific or clearly defined than that.

If the webpage is called “Fine Dining in London”, how do Ramsay’s new initiatives support that direction? Interestingly enough they do not in fact support that direction. The new Ramsay direction is in search of Ramsay’s best restaurant in England. The series on Channel 4 will follow Ramsay around the country as he tests restaurants nominated by the public, to ultimately crown the winner as Ramsay’s Best Restaurant.

I think the series is a lovely idea, and will get to showcase restaurants all over England. Is it a smart move for Ramsay? I still can’t wrap my head around how Ramsay is going to swear and pull horrible emotions out of the restaurant owners and workers in a best-of series. Where’s the conflict that Ramsay is best known for? Maybe this is all a part of his new image. Oh wait… there’s also a new book.

Ramsay’s Best Menus cookery book features 52 recipes from varied countries and is displayed in a cut-out style, where each course is in a section, so at any given time you can have a starter, a main course and a dessert open, all on one page. The webpage says that the recipe book allows for 140,000 different menu choices, but if you do buy the book, you’ll probably make 3 dishes from it and add it to your shelf of other Gordon Ramsay cookbooks.

I’m not even sure if Gordon Ramsay has a competitive advantage anymore. He obviously can’t compete with the Emmy winning, Ryan Seacrest backed Food Revolution, but it doesn’t seem like his new TV show and book are really anything new, anything different, or even anything remotely Ramsay.

Putting my cynical side away for the moment, I do hope that Ramsay does well and I do hope England embraces the new show…. but I don’t think it’s going to be the winning combination that he’s looking for.

Best Wishes Ramsay!

Welcome to planet Jargon. I know you’ve always been taught that we live on Earth, but that in fact is no longer the case. The almighty Oxford Dictionary has opened up, and some influential terms have been added. What do jargon and the Oxford Dictionary have to do with each other?

Lexicography. Although I intended to write a ridiculous sounding word, and then tell you it’s not a word, after a quick Google search, I was wrong (The Oxford Dictionary describes lexicography as “the activity or occupation of compiling dictionaries”).

The language that we use, that companies use whether in communicating to clients or in naming their products or services can have a significant impact on how persuasive we are, or how your clients speak about your products.

This summer between your staycations, you may have missed jargon generators in the news. I have two favorites, The Bullshit Generator and the Web-Economy Generator, which is extra juicy. In case you missed it, these simple tools take a verb, an adjective and a noun randomly from each column and put them together to create a so-called marketing phrase. The generators are a clever idea, and a good way to vent your past marketing bitterness.

Some of my favorite buzz-sayings from the Web-Economy Generator:

• Reinvent e-business convergence
• Strategise virtual relationships
• Exploit interactive users
• Synergise one-to-one ROI

These websites are perhaps holding a mirror up to society and saying a few things:

1. You’re using words that we don’t understand to describe processes and concepts that we really don’t care about.
2. Because we don’t understand what you’re saying, it must mean that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

I’m sure a few comics got a great deal of fresh summer material on the wave of the press attention that these phrase generators have been getting this summer. I also think that they do serve a purpose, maybe even to make us think about some of the terms we are using with our clients, and with people who didn’t study business from a textbook.

The following list is a selection of the words recently added to the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary, let’s take a look at some of the words recently added.

• Staycation
• Microblogging
• Social Media
• Netbook
• Dictionary Attack
• Paywall
• Tweetup
• LBD (This means Little Black Dress!)

Even from this selection, our level of familiarity and comfort with these words and terms varies greatly. Where do these words come from? A word like staycation was most likely either first used by someone in the travel, marketing or media industries. There are digital related words like paywall, microblogging and tweetup that if you said in series “a paywall microblogging tweetup”? could confuse even the most astute tuned-in digital guru.

Although the jargon generators are making comedic what happens every day, and are being extremely harsh, if you don’t understand a word or a meaning, the words no longer matter. As someone not very technical, I would be as equally confused with a techno speak generator, as I’m sure many people would be.

The words that we create and that then stick become real words. From a business or competitive advantage perspective, having your product name become the noun for the product or product category is quite an achievement. The Oxford Dictionary has added Netbook to mean a small computer, when this word is in fact derived from the product name Netbook, which is a small computer by Psion.

Twitter related words are now a part of our every day language (I am attending a tweetup this Thursday evening), and what a feat it is for Twitter, who is actually a company just like lots of others, whose terms have been so widely spread and generalized that are now officially words in the dictionary, literally.

Although by no means do I mean to compare the meaningless phrases that come out of the jargon generators to the pop-culture corporate terms that have now been added to the dictionary, but I do want to stress the importance of remembering your audience, whomever you are communicating to. What is their level of comfort with the language you are using? How effective is your presentation going to be, no matter how impressive-sounding it is, if no one in the audience really understands what you’re saying?

One of the writers that we work with has some great regular tips at The Oxford Word Barber. His observations are sublime, his content is funny as well as educational and he makes complete sense… sometimes!

Whilst sitting at the traffic lights on the busy Talgarth Road junction near Earls Court, my attention was drawn to a For Sale sign on one of the very attractive buildings fronting the carriageway. It reads ‘RememberTheWindow.com‘. 48 hours later I was sat at my desk and guess what popped into my head for no conscious reason?

Through a stroke of pure memorable relevance and then personal intrigue, I was drawn in to the Blog site of Christian Braun and his family who, having had no success through Estate Agents, are trying to sell their home privately online.

I’m not in the market to part with £1.395M for a slice of England’s not so green and pleasant juxtaposed A4 despite the buildings beauty, but you have to applaud this chaps strategy and passion for promoting this house. It’s certainly drawing a crowd. Good luck Christian.

Check out RememberTheWindow.com and also see the coverage he got in The Sunday Times.