Corporate jargon is derided universally, with the possible exception of people who insist on using it. (And for all we know, those people die inside a little more every time they say use sync as a noun. As well they should.) And the derision is well earned. Words have meaning. And while I admit that, as a copywriter, I sometimes end up manipulating those meanings for my own dark, commercialized purposes, the reason that manipulation is effective is that the words mean something in the first place. Corporate jargon is used to sidestep that meaning entirely for one’s own dark purposes, and that is objectively not okay.
Over at Vulture, Molly Young takes a well-deserved swing at the growing preponderance of businessspeak in the brilliantly titled article, “Garbage Language: Why do corporations speak the way they do?” Because really, why? Why replace meaningful words with meaningless ones? What is a company trying to accomplish by “operationalizing” instead of just… whatever “operationalizing” means.
First off: No, yeah, totally. I’m there.
That said: Maybe not entirely?
First off
The use of annoying corporate jargon is largely about fitting in, and about distinguishing oneself as someone who fits in. It’s a shibboleth of sorts — if you don’t know (or at least pretend to know) what it means to boil the ocean, you’re an outsider. But if you run things up the flagpole instead of just seeing what people think, that means you’re cool. Or take something offline instead of just have this discussion later or not sidetrack the meeting. (Note: I will give you a pass if you’re on Slack at the time and will be literally taking the discussion offline.)
Or, as Young notes with such rightful disgust in her article, parallel-freaking-pathing. In what dystopian parallel universe is that an understandable alternative to just “make two versions”? As she says,
I thought there was something gorgeously and inadvertently candid about the phrase’s assumption that a person would ever not be doing more than one thing at a time in an office — its denial that the whole point of having an office job is to multitask ineffectively instead of single-tasking effectively. Why invent a term for what people were already forced to do? It was, in its fakery and puffery and lack of a reason to exist, the perfect corporate neologism.
Molly Young, “Garbage Language: Why do corporations speak the way they do?”
It’s kind of like when you started smoking in high school: You did it because you thought it made you look cool, even though in reality, it was gross. And hopefully, you eventually realized that and quit doing it. Parallel-pathing is an unintelligible expression that makes things less understandable rather than more so. (And I’ve certainly never heard of it, and if I’ve never heard of something, that automatically makes it invalid, because I’m the arbiter of such things.)
One of my favorite jokes with my old creative partner is that if you get caught not paying attention during a meeting, all you have to do is look thoughtful and say, “But does it scale?” (1. I don’t know the actual origin of this fun little gag, or I would give credit, and 2. Jenny, I’m sorry if I’m spilling secretive secrets here.) Because while the concept of scaling is legitimate, the purpose of that phrase, mindfully uttered, is nothing but bullshit.
Young says the expected response to a request to parallel-path something is to nod and assent. But, as someone who has a psychologically unhealthy need to know exactly what’s expected of me, I can see myself saying, “What the [hopefully something work-appropriate here] is parallel-pathing?” Because if you use indecipherable jargon simply for the purpose of sounding cool, all you’re doing is keeping things from actually getting accomplished.
That said
As annoying as jargon expressions can be, you have to admit that some of them do have meaning. They have definitions. We might hate to hear “think outside the box,” but we know what the douchebag who said it meant when he told us to think outside the box. It’s eye-rolling, to be sure, but it’s also undeniably effective.
At Inc., Suzanne Lucas defends corporate jargon — to an extent — by pointing out that there are jargony expressions that people do like and respond to. She highlights a survey by Verizon that solicited people’s most and least favorite expressions. Big picture, for instance, and all hands on deck made the nice list, in large part, she says, because they reference positive things.
These phrases focus on teamwork and positive plans. Getting the big picture says “I’m not just going to focus on my small area, but I want to understand how we work together as a team.” Understanding what others do and how everything fits together makes a team function better.
And big picture certainly is an easier alternative to focus not on one small area but on the greater environment in which we’re working. Analysis paralysis and I’ll ping you made the naughty list because, Lucas speculates, they have a more negative or less team-centric connotation. I can’t speak to that, but I can say that anyone who wants to ping me can just as well email me instead, because if they call me or stop by my office without warning, I might well be moderately pissed off.
For a long time, I’ve cringed every time I’ve found myself using the phrase “reaching out.” But no matter how much I’ve cringed, I’ve also gone ahead and used it, because it’s convenient. “Thanks for contacting me” sounds stiff, “thanks for emailing” sounds awkward, as does “thanks for messaging me” when, for instance, a person has… ugh, reached out on LinkedIn or similar. “I’ll call, email, message, or stop by in an attempt to make contact” is just a mess. Reaching out is a cliche, but it’s a cliche that people understand. So I’ve stopped cringing, because what’s the point? Especially when I’m probably going to just keep on using it anyway.
Ditto bandwidth. Bandwidth has a real-world definition: the amount of data that can be transmitted over a network connection at once — in essence, whether the connection is too busy with the data it has to handle any more. “Do you have the bandwidth for this?” expands sensibly as a euphemism for, “Are you too busy and/or stressed and/or overloaded to take on this task?”
In my industry, we talk about concepting. “Concept” is not a verb. When I try to write it, “concepting” gets autocorrected every single time, because concepting is not a real word and I’m too lazy to add it to my autocorrect dictionary. Pretty much no one outside of said industry would know what the hell we were talking about if we said we were concepting, but we all accept that a concepting session is kind of like brainstorming but it also involves coalescing the resulting mini-ideas into a coherent Big Idea on which to build a larger campaign, except saying that would take forever and involve further defining Big Idea, and no one has time for that, because the deadline is yesterday and we have been allotted approximately ten minutes for concepting. And we all get it. No matter who else in the world don’t get it, we do.
(Note: I don’t care how attached you are to “impact” as a verb, and I don’t care what Merriam-Webster says — “impact” is not a verb.)
The big picture
When corporate-y euphemisms, in or out of the business sphere, interfere with communication — as so frequently they do — they’re bad. Or, as Young writes,
Wiener writes especially well — with both fluency and astonishment — about the verbal habits of her peers: “People used a sort of nonlanguage, which was neither beautiful nor especially efficient: a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime metaphors, inflated with self-importance. Calls to action; front lines and trenches; blitzscaling. Companies didn’t fail, they died.” She describes a man who wheels around her office on a scooter barking into a wireless headset about growth hacking, proactive technology, parallelization, and the first-mover advantage. “It was garbage language,” Wiener writes, “but customers loved him.”
Molly Young, “Garbage Language: Why do corporations speak the way they do?”
Just reading that makes me vicariously annoyed. The world is a worse place for that stuff existing. But when buzzwords actually make communication easier, are they that bad? When they’re somewhat annoying but still comprehensible and arguably more efficient, might it be time to just take a deep breath and accept our fate?
Language evolves. Sometimes, it evolves all stupid-like, and I will never accept the AP Stylebook’s ruling on literally. But just as we no longer use “awful” to describe something stunning and mind-boggling, we might be better off not wasting our energy on fighting go all in as an alternative to commit all our energy and resources to accomplishing this task. “Ideate?” Screw you. “Circle back?” I mean, no, but also maybe?
It’s a big question — certainly bigger than me alone. And maybe I’m just five-starring Granny’s meatloaf here. What’s your pontifexion?