"Through the use of various attributes and status' [the project] will support the various customer types with varying functionality..." Believe it or not, the writer actually means "statuses". But rather than scrapping the word and using something like "states" or "conditions", the author has allowed their confusion about the intended word to totally undermine any credibility they may have had by utilising a meaningless construct.
It is interesting to note that this sentence is not buried somewhere deep inside a dry and dusty document but appears on slide 3 of a PowerPoint pack. It was written as a management summary and was probably displayed on a large screen, before a sizeable audience, using a data projection facility. I would have been hard pressed to suppress a groan when I saw this one.
