>I think you'll find that "impact" is one of the more tolerable words of Microspeak: http://www.cinepad.com/mslex_3.htm
Intolerable when used figuratively. My wife is an editor and proof reader, and she is also utterly fed up with 'impact'. For the last year she has been editing high school textbooks and she is continually ripping impacts out of them. The words turns up much more often in subjects like economics, psychology, business & management and other "soft sciences" where the authors seem to be desperately striving for credibility. I have Julia Lerman's book Programming Entity Framework <http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Entity-Framework-Building-Centric/dp/0596 807260> and she uses 'impact' in various forms about 100 times. On one page she explains how using a certain expression can 'impact performance'. A few pages later she tells us that turning on a certain option will 'impact performance'. Only experienced readers would known that she actually means the opposite in each case. Her book (and others I have) are full of ambiguous, inappropriate or completely bizarre 'impacts'. Do what you can to help me eradicate the word from within Microsoft and the USA. Greg
