Complex Numbers

Put a Pin in This Synergy

I thought about writing this entry in ironic corporatespeak, but I can't bring myself to do it.

Forgive Me, For I Have Sinned ... Against The English Language  

Look, the English language isn't exactly pure as driven snow.

They're unavoidable — corporate buzzwords and gobbledygook.

Oh, they're avoidable, alright - you just have to be old enough to retire.

Belittled and unloved, corporate jargon endures, even thrives. There is no movement to rip down the wallpaper. And let's be honest fellow desk jockeys. Not only have we heard these words and phrases. We've probably used them ourselves.

Even worse than the author's use of corporate jargon are the atrocities committed against the English language in that paragraph.

The use of jargon is often tied to where people stand in a social hierarchy, according to a new paper from three social scientists... People with less prestige in an organization are more likely to use buzzwords. Like interns, new hires and first-year students.

Oh, it was in a paper; it must be true.

She makes a distinction between useful jargon in specialized fields such as medicine, science and law — and the workplace language so prevalent today, a hybrid of business school lingo and Silicon Valley hype. The latter, she says, is littered with "BS words — like orientate or guesstimate, or omnichannel or core competency."

To be fair, "orientate" is probably just fine in Britain, and "core competency" might actually have real meaning. The word "guesstimate" has been around for at least 45 years, and I have hated it for 50 of those years. Make a guess. Or an estimate. Pick one.

Okay, so apparently "guesstimate" has actually been around since the 1930s. That doesn't mean we can't make it stop if we really wanted to.

Let's take a word that suddenly became popular a few years ago: efforting. On the surface it sounds ridiculous.

Let's dig a little deeper... nope, it sounds ridiculous below the surface, too. But we English speakers love to verb nouns, and then gerundize the resulting verb. I remember when "parent" was strictly a noun, for example.

To quote the great sage Calvin, "Verbing weirds language."  

On a more consequential scale of slippery is the word "synergy," a longtime favorite of corporate executives extolling the benefits of mergers.

And this really pisses me off, because "synergy" is a great word with a specific meaning. But like many other words, it's been beaten into oblivion by oblivious idiots.

Being able to complain about language changes is one of the many perks of getting older, along with joint pain and ragging on "kids these days." But I've always hated corporate jargon, and did my best not to practice it when I was running a company. I should have had a swear jar, except it'd be called a jargon jar. While swearing in a professional setting is generally frowned upon, buzzwords are far, far worse offenses.