Leverage

Back in February I said that I would start posting the evil buzzwords that I hear all day long. Then, I moved back to a different office branch. By July, I had calmed down. Well, that ended. Although I have been in the buzzword-filled office branch for only half a week, they are back with a vengeance and assaulting my eardrums until I can feel them scratching the back of my eyes.

Let's start this with one of the two buzzwords that are the bane of my existence: leverage.

Leverage

What it means:

Noun.
    1. The action of a lever.
    2. The mechanical advantage of a lever.
  2. Positional advantage; power to act effectively
  3. The use of credit or borrowed funds to improve one's speculative capacity and increase the rate of return from an investment, as in buying securities on margin.
Verb.
    1. To provide (a company) with leverage.
    2. To supplement (money, for example) with leverage.
  2. To improve or enhance

Source: American Heritage Dictionary via the Free Dictionary

What my company thinks it means:

Verb.
  1. To use

Sentence used in my office:

Context: I wrote a GUI that connects to a microcontroller I programmed. The microcontroller sits on a data bus in our system and dumps the raw information on the bus out to the PC for debugging purposes. "Say I want to leverage [your software] to be able to leverage [your device] and collect data. Could I leverage that data as the example protocol data for [my paper] going forward?"

How this sentence could have been said:

"Could I use data from [your software] and [your device] as the protocol example in [my paper]?"

I swear to Cthulhu that this phrase was prattled at me. And, similar to Cthulhu, hearing this question destroyed part of my sanity.