http://unsuck-it.com/as-soon-as-possible-asap/
Strange; Whenever someone tells me they need something ASAP, I generally consider it to mean "they don't know when they need it, so it's not important".
Not necessarily. Imagine that you get a performance bonus based on how quickly you finish a task, and you're waiting on someone else for something. You don't have a specific deadline, but the sooner you get what you need, the better.
You COULD make an artificial deadline and say "I need this today." But that means "drop everything for me." Maybe you're emailing your boss and don't have the clout to demand that, or maybe you want to save that demand for when you REALLY need it today.
So ASAP would be my way of saying "it's important, but I recognize that something else on your list might be even more important." The "P" gives the receiver some wiggle room. In that way, I think it's more polite than "today," while still more urgent than "sometime this week."
Eat your Own Dog Food is the one I never get. I know it's supposed to mean that your dog food should be good enough to eat yourself, but it's akin to expecting the CEO of a pet food company to open a can and start eating!
I think that it's more memorable this way precisely because it's unlikely to happen. Think of the riddle: "Why does Dog Food taste like shit?" "Because nobody ever eats it."
If the saying was "Eat your own croissants," it wouldn't have the same punch because most croissants are reasonably edible and indeed people who make croissants do taste test them.
Think of a sentence containing "at the end of the day". Now remove that phrase. Does your sentence convey any less information? Unless the time of day is actually germane to what you are saying something (e.g. "At the end of the day I draw the curtains and have a cup of cocoa.") then it is just superfluous verbiage. And that's bad because it obscures the message.
"Boilerplate" is jargon, but conveys some information, so I think that's OK.
The Etymology of Boilerplate is fascinating. Imagine receiving a press release on a piece of steel plate so that you could put it right onto the presses. Neat-o!
I was once in an industry meeting with representatives from five major corporations. The corporate-speak got so bad sometimes I could barely follow it. It was like a different dialect.
After a while I noticed that the more unpleasant the thing the speaker was trying to convey, the thicker the dialect got. One guy treated us to five minutes of near-impenentrable jargon that ultimately boiled down to "what's in it for us?"
