Lucy Kellaway of Financial Times has just distributed the 2012 ‘Golden Flannel Awards‘ for ‘guff, cliché, euphemism and verbal stupidity‘. The winner of the Preposition Award is the innocuous word “to” as increasingly heard in presentations: “I’ve got some slides to talk to” – the unfortunate implication being that the speaker has to talk to the slides because no one else is listening. But rather than being ‘verbal stupidity’ I think this phrase simply accurately reflects our recent observations on slides becoming more important than people. On a more general note, I wish Lucy extended her awards from the corporate sector to academia. I am sure we academics can easily steal all those prizes from CEOs without PhDs. Which of the corporate reports would have anything matching the “disentangling intertwined social, economical and ecological resource governance challenges using a transdisciplinary systems approach“?