habitually probing generalist

Attack of the Zombie Copy by Erin Kissane at A List Apart is an excellent and humorous take on editing those sentences that don’t really mean anything.

Come on.  You’ve all seen them in business, on the web, and heaven forbid, even in our libraries and universities.  Mission statements are particularly prone to spontaneous zombie spawning.

Leveraging world class infrastructure strengths, mature quality processes and industry benchmarked people management practices…

Uwe Pörksen would call them "plastic words," but by reading the above article maybe you can be goaded into excising them where you find them.  If we can just get rid of them, then maybe knowing the theory behind them won’t be as critical.  Although, I do highly recommend Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language.  If you truly care about language you should read this book.

Here’s a previous post I did on an article by J.M. van der Laan, entitled "Plastic Words: Words Without Meaning," that was about Pörksens’s book.  Maybe it can intrigue you into reading either the article or the book.