##Buzzkiller##

Wait, what?

So I can't speak for you, but I don't like buzzwords. I've worked in media companies and the tech startup scene long enough to start to actually get a little itchy when someone starts tossing them out. Of course, I'm not all that much better — I've certainly seen a bunch fall out of my mouth too, and that makes me sadder yet.

A while back, I'd read about Matt Might's weasel word Perl scripts, and I loved the idea. So, after a conversation with some friends about buzzword-crazed emails, I decided I wanted to port the idea to Python.

This is so very, very much a work in progress, but so far, it's fun!

Usage is pretty straightforward: the script will run a check against the files stored, and it will tell you all about the things it finds. It's looking for buzzwords, office jargon-type terms, and weasel words (as defined by Matt as noted above).

You would run it thusly:

./buzzkiller.py many various peak performance top-down silo

To use a file full of words to check against, instead of the command line, try it this way:

./buzzkiller.py --file exampleFile.txt

To run it with a file and extra arguments, you might do that like this:

./buzzkiller.py --file exampleFile.txt many various peak performance top-down silo

You can also specify an output file, like so:

./buzzkiller.py --log 'output.txt'

There's also a verbose mode, in case you were curious as to what was being searched for and against:

./buzzkiller.py --file exampleFile.txt -v

To do everything, try this:

./buzzkiller.py --file exampleFile.txt -v --log 'output.txt' many various peak performance top-down silo

And depending on what you're searching, you'll probably see output like this:

Here goes some parse magic...

checking file named weaselwords.txt
checking file named buzzwords.txt
checking file named officewords.txt

Alrighty, let's see what you've got here: 

WEASELWORD: many
WEASELWORD: few
OFFICEWORD: bandwidth
OFFICEWORD: orbit
BUZZWORD: cloud

Oh also, you'll need the argparse module for Python. If you're running Python 2.7+, you should already have it. If not, you should be able to install it with easy_install or apt-get or whatever works on the system you're using.

Finally, I should note, the list of buzzwords is cobbled together from a few internet sources discussing the matter, most notably this post from Adam Sherk's blog post on the subject and Marlys Harris' column on office terms. More will be added, and attributed, accordingly.

P.S. I should note that doing any of this would have been way giant amounts harder (and probably never attempted) were it not for Beautiful Soup and Adam Parrish's awesome Python tips.