Don’t shoot the messenger

We don’t hate the actual words of corporate jargon, according to Gretchen McCulloch, internet linguist and author of the forthcoming Because Internet.

She says the words associated with business speak are just euphemisms for all the frustrations we harbour about work: colleagues who we would not actually befriend in the real world, office politics and even the daily onslaught of communication.

“In many cases when you see people disliking something about language, it’s more a symptom than a cause. You see this everywhere – people dislike how teenagers talk because they have worries about where ‘the youth’ are going,” she adds. “Euphemisms eventually take on the quality of the things that they’re being euphemistic for.”

Corporate language is like any other euphemistic speech. So, when you ‘run it up the flagpole’ for review, eventually the words stop being a tepid stand-in for getting approval for whatever ‘it’ is. The phrase becomes as grating to hear as waiting for superiors to sign-off on the project itself.

A word like ‘synergy’ that inspires ire is not harmful in itself. The word has been in use since at least 1850, says Geoff Pullum, professor of general linguistics at the the University of Edinburgh. “Meanings evolve, rather slowly,” he says. “The people who suddenly turn on [these words] as ‘jargon’ are being irrational.”

In a way, he is right: anger with the words in an email isn’t actually what you should be mad about. McCulloch says that the words themselves are innocent bystanders in your frustration, but it’s “easier to take those frustrations out on a phrase than it is to admit that you’re annoyed with this other person and you don’t enjoy email and you wish you could just swear at the other person”.