Olga Khazan* says the corporate buzzwords people know best tend to be the ones that irritate them the most.
Photo: RapidEye
If there’s anything the corporate world has a knack for, it’s inventing new, positive words that polish up old, negative ones.
Silicon Valley has recast the chaotic-sounding “break things” and “disruption” as good things.
An anxious cash grab is now a “monetisation strategy” and if you mess up and need to start over, just call it a “pivot” and press on.
It’s the Uber for BS, you might say.
Cloying marketing-speak, of course, isn’t limited to the tech world.
As a health reporter, much of my work involves wending my way through turgid academic studies, which are full of awkward turns of phrase such as salience and overweight (used as a noun, as in “the prevalence of overweight”).
Even more tedious is reading some of the reports put out by nonprofit organisations, which always seem to want to arm “stakeholders” with tools for their “toolboxes”.
I wish journalists were immune, given that we fancy ourselves to be plainspoken, but sadly common in our world is talk of “deep dives” and “impactful long form”.
(Use of the word impactful is strongly discouraged by The Atlantic’s copy desk. As is the use of many other words.)
Not quite a cliché, not quite a term of art, a buzzword is a profound-seeming phrase devised by someone important to make something sound better than it is.
Typically, the buzzword develops a shibboleth status in a given field — “We’re all about Big Data” — to the point where everyone is saying it and everyone feels as if they must say it.
Meanwhile, with each repetition and slide deck, the term grows more hackneyed, and many of its speakers grow more nauseated at its mention.
Does anyone actually say “disrupt” with a straight face anymore?
When I recently asked on Twitter about everyone’s least favourite buzzwords, people really “mind-shared” some good ones.
“Capacity” grates, as does “at-risk” when describing people, along with the delightfully redundant “root cause”.
The “optics” of “growth hacking” do little to “value-add”, as well.
But the strange thing is, these folks are from the fields in which those words are used.
Like everyone’s loud tipsy uncle, the buzzwords people know best tend to be the ones that irritate them most.
That so many people continue to use these words anyway speaks to one of the most powerful quirks of office life — and the power dynamics that make it so difficult to change.
According to Gretchen McCulloch, the author of Because Internet, buzzwords were born from the artifice of the office itself.
At work, people are paid to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do in their leisure time.
They don’t dress at the office the way they do at home; they don’t act at the office the way they do outside of it; and they don’t talk about drilling down and rightsizing around their friends.
Buzzwords mark the boundary of work life, broadcasting “I’m working!”.
They allow workers to relate to one another — the much-decried “synergy” is an important part of a lot of people’s jobs, after all.
Frankly, buzzwords also help save time.
You can command a co-worker to “get their ducks in a row” and have them basically know what you mean.
In this way, speaking in business jargon is a way of showing that you fit in with the office.
From a more cynical perspective, buzzwords are useful when office workers need to dress up their otherwise pointless tasks with fancier phrases — you know, for the optics.
Coalminers and doctors and tennis instructors have specific jargon they use to get their points across, but “all-purpose business language is the language you use when you aren’t really doing anything”, says anthropologist David Graeber, the author of Bullshit Jobs.
Similarly, buzzwords can provide a PR-friendly gloss on whatever “pain points” you’re trying to cover up.
Given its ubiquity, we might expect workers to stop worrying and embrace the buzzword.
What’s so wrong with a little thought-leading?
The reason buzzwords are so annoying, McCulloch says, is that language is inherently a reflection of the people who speak it and the circumstances in which it’s used.
Terms such as “circling back” and “touching base” are inseparable from that one annoying work task you’re just trying to get someone to respond to.
“If you find corporate buzzwords annoying, it’s probably because you find work annoying,” McCulloch says.
The fact that buzzwords are a joke even to many of the people who rely on them suggests that work, and its language, is a kind of pretence.
And speaking the language of work reminds people that they’re pretending.
Graeber remembers the first time he and his high-school friends shook hands, as kind of a gag.
It became a recurring joke, as in “Oh, this is what adults do”.
“People in these offices are permanently caught at that moment,” Graeber says.
We’re forever “closing the loop” on things because of a vague notion that this is what adults do.
Few people enjoy faking it in this way, though.
Buzzwords are a reminder, in a way, of a time in life when it was acceptable to speak more plainly and say what you really meant.
The realisation that you’re rarely doing much of either anymore can be depressing.
Blue-sky scenario, you would ditch the wheelhouses and start speaking more straightforwardly.
But McCulloch warns that doing so may brand you as an iconoclast — something that’s more fraught for women and people of colour, who already face greater barriers to acceptance in the workplace.
For many workers, it can be risky to tell your boss that you’re going to “come up with really random, insane ideas to see if you like any of them”, rather than that you plan to “think outside the box”.
So, rather than disrupting the status quo, you may just want to leverage your ability to speak Corporate to bring more to the table.
At least until you become the boss.
* Olga Khazan is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She tweets at @olgakhazan.
This article first appeared at www.theatlantic.com.
