Macbeth said it. Act 5, Scene 5, I think. “It is a tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Most people think he was talking about Life. We know better. He was obviously talking about e-mail.

Take today, for instance. It’s only 8 AM and here’s what I have:

Some vendor I don’t know is asking me to upgrade a program I don’t own. An industry trade is sending me its daily morning newsletter. A magazine I don’t read is featuring its monthly lineup. The New York Times is sending me Today’s Headlines. Allposters.com tells me that for 48 hours only I can get up to 30% off on some posters I don’t want. Who gets posters? I don’t. Maybe one day a while ago I bought a poster for my kid. Now every day I get an offer about posters. I thought I spammed that. I guess I’ll do it again. Friggin’ Reunion.com won’t get off my back! There’s some guy in the Yukon Territory, I’m not making this up, who keeps searching my name. I don’t know anybody there, but he keeps searching me. And they keep telling me about it. When I try to exit their site, I get an error message! What a pain! I’ll send them to junk mail, too, except haven’t I already done that? Why do they keep coming back? Telecharge is offering me low-priced tickets to a show I don’t want to see… two newsletters I signed up for that have interesting stuff I’m not interested in… another newsletter! And another! News stories from all over. Gossip sites with their daily blab. Sales numbers! Hm. God. It’s rough out there and I don’t need a spreadsheet to tell me. More sales numbers. More news stories. Sales numbers. Request for approval on something I’ve already approved. A chain about nothingness on which I’m cc’d. Another of those. A self-congratulatory note masquerading as an attaboy. A blog. Another blog. And another. An ad pimping for an upcoming conference. And another. Who can afford to go to all these conferences in this economic environment? Oh look. Here’s a conference on the technology of conference calls. It’s in Park City, Utah! Gotta go to that, right? An ad from JetBlue. An ad from Restoration Hardware.

Finally I see there’s a draft of a document I need to read. At last! Content! Real, honest-to-God content! Except you know what? The guy’s assistant just dropped the hard copy on my desk fifteen minutes ago. So the purpose of the e-mail is unclear. Do I need an electronic document? In fact, why is any of this here? As far as I’m concerned, twenty years into the medium, legitimate uses for e-mail are limited to:

• making plans for meals, meetings, meetings over meals
• transmission of jokes and funny videos
• news alerts signifying the end of the world, which clearly is at hand
• orders from the boss
• information about upcoming parties
• data

Beyond that, I have a suggestion: We’re clearly into an era of downsizing. How about extending that trend to electronic transactions? I mean, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in its petty pace, and all that. But does every last syllable of recorded time have to be documented?

A few years ago, I noticed that people, particularly very important people, had stopped going to the bathroom. Instead, they had “stepped away.” This concept of “stepping away” grew in a very short time to include bagging the second half of the day entirely. As in, “Mr. Woosley seems to have stepped away for a little bit,” when in fact Woosley is on the jitney headed to a time-share in Bordeaux Beach.

A euphemism is defined by my friend Wikipedia as ”a substitution of an agreeable or less offensive expression in place of one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant to the listener.” We do that all the time in our increasingly less profitable world. Perhaps it has something to do with things being tough. When times are good, we may not need the choice alternative expression for things quite so much. We can just let people go, because that’s a relatively rare occurance, rather than “downsizing,” “right-sizing,” “rationalizing the cost base,” or even “decruiting” them with moderately extreme prejudice.

Wiki also notes that some euphemisms are intended to be funny. In that vein, today’s euphemism comes to us from the end of our very short, very unlazy summer. God, how I envy school-children and their teachers! But that’s another matter. We select this euphemism because of its currency and the fact that I only recently noticed it in widespread usage. Here’s what kicked me off: Last Monday I called my associate, Farquhar. “He’s traveling this week,” said his assistant, Maggie.

“Traveling? Where?” I inquired. To where? Katmandu? I believe at this point even they get a BlackBerry signal.

Maggie seemed uncomfortable. “He’s… traveling… to different places, you know, but he’s reachable in an emergency. Is this an emergency?”

What’s an emergency in business? I mean, there are some, but is the need to iron out a situation an emergency? It could be, if it’s not ironed out, but it’s not yet, right? It depends. If he’s sitting at a phone in LA working his email, then I don’t mind rousting him, but if he’s meeting with the Dalai Lama to hammer out an endorsement deal…

“… because he’s, y’know… traveling,” she concluded in a slightly pained tone. Clearly, this was the entire burden of the message she was authorized to communicate.

“… is he… on vacation?” I inquired. I was beginning to get it. We are now at the point where people have to apologize for having a life.

“You could take it that way,” said Maggie. So I left Farquhar alone. A man needs his time off.

So that’s our euphemism of the day. “Vacation” has been replaced with “traveling.” Because, I supposed, traveling is a legitimate business occupation, while vacating is not.

Got any others? I’m open to your incoming interface.

The Wall Street Journal starts our week with one of its classic observational front page stories. This one notes the prevalence of a new metaphor that is now running like grain through a goose through the CEO community. It seems impossible to describe the current business environment without using the word “headwinds”. 

For instance, the paper quotes Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors, telling auto analysts on January 17: “As we look out, we’ve got to be realistic that we are facing some tough headwinds, particularly here in the U.S., with a relatively weak industry.”  Jerry Yang of Yahoo and G. Kennedy Thompson of Wachovia are also invoked, among others.

Business does this. I remember when I started out in business, you had to have excellence. Everybody had to have a (usually pristine and unread) copy of Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s lengthy, repetitive, preachy tome on the subject, In Search of Excellence, on proud display on their desktop. No meeting was complete without a segment in which people talked about excellence, the drive to achieve excellence, and a lot of cheering and hand-clapping in recognition of those who had in some way quantified or demonstrated extreme excellence.

Not long after we all searched for and found excellence, we moved on to Quality. We had Quality circles and Quality focus groups and Quality meetings to achieve Productivity. For about three years we had so much Quality everywhere that we actually killed it. Now nobody can talk about Quality without getting a pretty good laugh at the mention of the word.

As I noted, Quality was often a screen for the process by which Productivity was achieved. In case you didn’t know, which I’m sure you do, Productivity was a euphemism for firing people and making other people do their jobs. When you have fewer people doing more, you ipso facto have more Productivity. That is why I have always hated Productivity. Speaking personally, when I am achieving maximum Productivity, I am usually exhausted.

Buzzwords function to mask the true meaning of things. That’s why the most prevalent ones at any time usually have to do with something nasty. In the case of Excellence, you had a bunch of middle managers patting each other on the back in an orgy of self-congratulation. Quality was an excuse to plunge an organization into what amounted to a Stalinist socialist re-education program, delivering the afflicted company to the doorstep of Productivity, which produced Re-Engineering that created Decruitment of Excess Personnel, then some Headcount Rationalizations and then everybody was looking for their Cheese, which apparently was moved. 

And now we have Headwinds. Oh Captain my Captain, your fearful ship boldly wends its way forth over the choppy waves! The headwinds are vicious — but it’s a good vessel, fitted to perfection and utterly rightsized! The crew is dedicated! Our uniforms are crisp and natty, their golden buttons glowing in the spume and sunshine! Yes, the Headwinds are brisk, but we can make it! If anyone can, we can! After all, don’t these Headwinds afflict us all? I mean, isn’t everybody using the same word to describe them? Onward! Headwinds be damned!

It was a decent metaphor, I’ll grant you that. But there’s one thing about buzzword like it. They’re all killed by overuse. And we’re pretty much there, I think.

Here are a few suggestions for replacements as the credit crisis deepens, the dollar hawks up phlegm and everybody growing increasingly squirrelly about 08:

• Heavy Lifting, as in “We’re going to have to do some heavy lifting to get the year off the ground, but we’re hopeful.”
• Monkey Meat, as in “The rest of the quarter looks like a lump of monkey meat.
• A Bag of Worms, as in “This is a fine bag of worms we’ve gotten ourselves into, but we see the later part of 08 still pretty solid.”
• A Deep and Muddy Swamp, as in “The continuing failure of our debt instruments is leading us further and further into a deep and muddy swamp from which there looks to be no escape at this time other than to live through it and try to come out the other side alive.”

Goodness. That doesn’t sound very euphemistic, does it? Why don’t we just say that business stinks and forget about it?