I am looking for the transcript of a commentary piece on NPR a couple
of years ago by a professor of linguistics.  He talked about how
management consultants butcher the english language with buzzwords and
phrases...in particular there was a memorable quote (something close
to) "mgmt consultants go through the english language like brazilian
farmers go through rainforest".
 
I tried searching the NPR archives online, with no luck.  I think I
remember that the prfessor was from Princeton, but I could be wrong. 
This was somewhere between 98 and 2000.
 
I am interested in locating the full transcript of this commentary
segment.  General advice for finding it (via search engines, etc) will
be appreciated, but the speech itself or a link directly to it will be
necessary for payment. 

hey Steve - is this it?

http://www.npr.org/ramarchives/nc7f2101-14.ram

sorry - I forgot to add the link - from the bottom of this page:

http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/archives/nc7f21.html

Or this one?
http://search1.npr.org/opt/collections/torched/totn/data_totn/seg_67943.htm

1999, Psychology professor at MIT, slang dumbing down lanugage.

Search here, I used 'linguistics' as a keyword.
http://www.npr.org/archives/

I know it was post Jan 1998, and it was on ATC, and it was a guy who
was speaking.  Thanks for the links, I'll go ahead and try some other
searches in the archives...the offer is still open though.

i think i heard that essay too - he made fun of (among other things)
how the business world turns nouns into verbs like productize.

i don't know who it was but i can confirm it was in the 98 timeframe
and it was on ATC.

you might like these related books: The Way We Talk Now and Junk
English - in fact, The Way We Talk Now might be the guy who did the
ATC essay.

joe

this entry doesn't have the rainforest metaphor you spoke of, but does
match j0e's comment

"Business people speak a different language. They not only shift
paradigms,
they re-engineer, they outsource, they value- chain, they downsize,
and now
they upsize. Sometimes business people don't even use words, they
speak in
acronyms. Business are MBO'd, TQM'd, LBO'd and CEO'd, all on the Q.T.,
ASAP.
Business language takes nouns and turns them into verbs."