Amaze Your Friends, Confuse Your Enemies, Flummox your Co-Workers and Start Arguments
Here are a few meaningless phrases that I have compiled to throw into discussions. These just completely muddy the water and/or make you sound smarter:
"That's just semantics"
"That is a symptom of the overall problem, not a root cause"
"Yeah, and you see how Sartre/Kierkegaard/Lenin/insert name here wound up"
"You're splitting hairs here"
"Of course it was rhetorical"
"Well, obviously it's been going on since Bretton Woods"
As my field is computers, here are some handy phrases to get you off the hook with your boss or co-workers should you ever need them. They are partially meaningless but will get you off the hook if you FUBARed the network or something. Write them down and keep them in your desk!
"Are we talking back-end or front-end?"
"It would be much faster to just do it in Linux"
"It's the kernel, I guarantee it"
"It would have to be scalable"
"I would have to check the system event logs on that"
"It's the firewall"
"The partitions are corrupted"
"No, he/she doesn't get root access. Not gonna happen."
"It takes a while to propagate through the system"
"Going open source is going to save you a lot of money"
"Reboot everything. You know what, stagger the reboots"
The following are all true, but are guaranteed to alienate people and start arguments. Save them for Thanksgiving!!
"Right, but if the Ukrainians were black, nobody would care"
"What you and I think of as capitalism is predatory capitalism. And the to the business world, capitalism means nanny-state socialism"
"Think of how stupid the average person is. And then realize that exactly half of the planet is even more stupid"
"You're not basing your opinions on fact, you're looking for facts to justify your baseless opinions"
"Your grandkids/great-grandkids are going to need a snorkel to visit Miami when they're you're age. Is your Instagram account really that important in the scheme of things?"
"When an individual blames others for things that he or she does themselves, that's human nature. When a society does that, it's called foreign relations"
"Most people don't care about most things and most other people"