The Honest Pain
The fluorescent bulb above the boardroom table is flickering at exactly 48 hertz, a rhythmic twitch that mirrors the pulsing pain in my left index finger. I just sustained a paper cut from a thick, white envelope-the kind that contains either a wedding invitation or a lawsuit-and the salt from my sweat is finding its way into the tiny, jagged opening. It is a sharp, honest pain. It reminds me that I am alive, even as I sit in this meeting where language is being systematically murdered.
My boss, a man who wears a $888$ watch but cannot fix a leaking faucet, nods sagely at the bullet points. He looks at me, expecting an affirming grunt, or perhaps a realization of his brilliance. I stare at the 18-point font and realize I have no idea what he actually wants me to do by Monday.
Jargon as Camouflage
This is the linguistic tax we pay for the privilege of working in air-conditioned rooms. Jargon is not merely annoying; it is a camouflage for the intellectually bankrupt. When you cannot articulate a specific path forward-when you do not grasp the mechanics of the problem you are paid to solve-you reach for words that sound heavy and expensive.
If you speak in clouds, no one can pin you to the ground when the storm fails to arrive.
I find myself pressing my thumb against the paper cut, the sharp sting acting as an anchor to reality while the room dissolves into a soup of ‘deliverables’ and ‘ecosystems.’
The Binary Reality of Precision
Stella K.L. would hate this room. I met Stella 28 months ago when she was tuning the pipe organ at the old cathedral downtown. Stella is a pipe organ tuner, a profession that demands a level of precision that corporate middle managers would find terrifying. There is no room for ‘disruptive paradigms’ when you are standing inside a wooden box surrounded by $458$ lead-tin pipes, some no larger than a pencil and others reaching 18 feet into the vaulted shadows.
Small Pipe
Mid Pipe
Vaulted Pipe
Stella does not ‘leverage’ the wind chest; she ensures the sliders move without friction so the air reaches the languid plate at the correct pressure. If the pitch is flat, she does not ‘actualize a value-add solution.’ She takes a brass tuning tool and gently flares the top of the pipe to sharpen the vibration. It is a physical, binary reality. The pipe is in tune, or it is a lie.
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She once misidentified a reed pipe as a flue pipe during a particularly humid summer, an error that cost her $8$ hours of rework. She admitted this mistake with a shrug, a vulnerability that I have never seen in a C-suite executive. In the corporate world, admitting you were wrong is a ‘strategic pivot.’ For Stella, it was just a mistake that needed fixing.
The Cost of Noise
She understands that words are like pipes: if they are hollow and poorly constructed, they produce nothing but noise. We have built an entire economy on noise. We spend 58 percent of our day in meetings where the primary goal is to reach a consensus on the meaning of words that were invented solely to avoid making a decision.
Time Lost to Obscurity
It is a corrosion of the soul that begins with a ‘touch-base’ and ends with a ‘holistic realignment.’
The Cult of Obscurity
I suspect the reliance on this dialect stems from a deep-seated fear of being seen as simple. We associate complexity with expertise, even though the highest form of mastery is the ability to explain a complex system to a child.
Optimize omnichannel engagement
Answer the phone when people call us
The irony is that the more ‘synergy’ we discuss, the less actual collaboration occurs. The words act as a substitute for thought. We use them like Lego bricks, snapping together pre-fabricated phrases until we have built a tower of nonsense that looks impressive from a distance but has no rooms inside for people to live in. This results in a massive waste of human energy. I once read a report that claimed the average worker loses 188 hours a year just trying to decipher what their superiors actually meant in their emails.
The Violence of Vagueness
There is a specific kind of violence in a vague instruction. When a leader says, ‘We need to move the needle on our key performance indicators,’ they are abdicating their responsibility to lead. They are throwing a handful of glitter into the air and asking the staff to describe the patterns it makes as it falls.
You cannot fail at ‘leveraging core competencies’ because the success criteria are as nebulous as the language itself. We are hiding from the possibility of failure by hiding from the clarity of English.
When you need to get from the airport to a mountain resort during a blizzard, you want a guarantee that you will arrive without ending up in a ditch. You want something like the service provided by Mayflower Limo, where the value is found in the actual act of driving, not the vocabulary used to describe it.
Linguistic Cowardice
Perhaps the reason I am so sensitive to this is my own history of linguistic cowardice. I remember a project in 2008 where I was tasked with explaining why a software rollout had failed. I could have said, ‘The code was buggy and we didn’t test it enough.’ Instead, I wrote an 18-page document about ‘unforeseen architectural incongruities’ and ‘asynchronous development cycles.’ I felt very smart while writing it. I felt protected. No one could blame me because no one could understand what I was saying.
Wolf Tones: The Internal Wince
“Thought Leadership”
“A good idea”
Jargon creates dissonance; we nod externally while wincing internally.
I was 38 years old then, and I thought that was what being a professional meant. I am still learning to strip away the layers of linguistic fat that have accumulated over years of trying to sound important.
