I am gripping the edge of a mahogany table so hard my knuckles have turned the color of unbleached parchment. Around me, 19 people are nodding in a rhythmic, terrifying synchronicity. The air in the conference room is stale, tasted of ozone and expensive espresso, but the man at the front-let’s call him Marcus, though his name matters less than his lanyard-is currently mid-sentence. He says, “We need to leverage our core competencies to synergize a paradigm shift in our go-to-market strategy.” He pauses, waiting for the weight of it to settle. It doesn’t settle. It evaporates. It is a sentence composed entirely of linguistic vapor, a collection of sounds that mimic the shape of an idea without actually containing one. My brain, perhaps in a desperate act of self-preservation, chooses this exact moment to remind me that I accidentally deleted 3009 photos from my phone last Tuesday. Three years of visual evidence of my existence, gone because I was trying to “optimize my digital footprint.” The irony is not lost on me; I was using the same hollow logic to manage my memories that Marcus is using to manage this company.

The Ghost in the Machine

Language is the ghost of a meaning that died in a meeting.

The Luthier’s Truth

I think often of June V.K., a woman who spends her days in a workshop that smells of linseed oil and ancient dust. June is a grandfather clock restorer. I visited her 49 days ago to ask about a ticking sound in my wall that turned out to be a loose floorboard, but I stayed for the way she spoke. In June’s world, words have weight. She doesn’t talk about “optimizing temporal throughput.” She talks about the verge escapement, the pendulum bob, and the crutch. If she tells you that the teeth on a wheel are worn, it means the clock will stop. There is no “moving the needle” in her workshop unless a literal needle is moving across a literal dial. She once told me, while hunched over a 1749 longcase clock, that you can’t lie to a gear. You can call a broken spring a “non-linear energy storage challenge” all you want, but the clock still won’t chime at midnight.

The decay of our language is a leading indicator of intellectual rot. When we stop using words that point to physical realities, we lose our grip on the truth itself. We start to believe our own slides. We start to think that because we have 29 bullet points on a screen, we have a plan. In reality, we have a list of adjectives masquerading as a strategy. I remember sitting through a presentation last year where the speaker used the word “disruption” 59 times. By the end of the hour, I wasn’t sure if we were launching a software update or starting a civil war. This is the danger: when the language becomes untethered from the work, the work becomes a performance. We are no longer builders; we are actors playing the role of executives, reciting lines written by a committee that was too afraid to say something boring and true.

The Sharpness of Necessity

This is where the distinction becomes vital. In specialized fields, technical language-what we often mistake for jargon-serves a purpose. When a luthier speaks of the “purfling” on a violin, they are describing a specific, inlaid decoration that also prevents cracks from spreading. It is a word born of necessity. If you walk into the workshop of

Di Matteo Violins, you won’t hear them talking about “disrupting the acoustic ecosystem.” They will talk about the grain of the spruce, the tension of the strings, and the angle of the bridge. These words are hard, sharp, and useful. They are the antithesis of the corporate fog. A violin is a physical manifestation of clear thinking. You cannot “synergize” a better tone out of a poorly carved instrument. You have to take the chisel and do the work. The language of the luthier is a map of the object itself, whereas the jargon of the boardroom is a map of a place that doesn’t exist.

The Safety of Vagueness

Why do we do it? Why do we nod when someone says they want to “circle back and touch base on the low-hanging fruit”? We do it because it’s safe. To speak clearly is to stand naked. If I tell you exactly what I think, you can disagree with me. If I wrap my thoughts in 9 layers of linguistic bubble wrap, you can’t even find the thought, let alone challenge it. Jargon is the ultimate defensive armor for the mediocre. It allows a person to occupy a high-level position for 19 years without ever having a single, original idea. It is the language of the status quo. It is the sound of a bureaucracy breathing.

I remember a specific moment during a project 229 days ago. We were tasked with “reimagining the customer journey.” For three weeks, we sat in rooms with whiteboards and talked about “touchpoints” and “omni-channel integration.” On the final day, an intern who hadn’t yet learned the script raised her hand and asked, “Wait, are we just trying to make the website easier to use?” The room went silent. It was as if she had walked into a high-society gala and pointed out that the host wasn’t wearing pants. We all knew she was right, but her clarity was an insult to the thousands of man-hours we had spent making the problem sound complicated. We didn’t want it to be easy; we wanted it to be “strategic.” If it’s just making a website easier, anyone can do it. If it’s an “omni-channel reimagining,” you need a consultant and a $979-an-hour budget.

Democratizing Understanding

Clear language is a threat to the hierarchy because it democratizes understanding. When the work is described in plain English, the person at the bottom of the ladder can see the mistakes of the person at the top. Jargon maintains the wall. It creates a priesthood of the abstract. I find myself yearning for the world of June V.K., where the mistakes are loud and physical. If she puts a gear in backward, the clock screams. If she uses the wrong oil, the movement gums up. There is a brutal honesty in the mechanical world that we have lost in the digital and corporate spheres. We have replaced the scream of the gear with the soft, polite hum of the “pivot.”

The Final Release

In the end, the jargon will fail us. It always does. You can’t build a bridge out of adjectives, and you can’t sustain a culture on empty promises. Eventually, the clock stops, the violin cracks, or the customer walks away because they can’t find the “buy” button hidden under 9 layers of “value-added content.” I look at my hand, still gripping the table. I let go. The wood is cool and real. It doesn’t need to be leveraged. It just needs to be touched. I decide that when it is my turn to speak, I will not mention synergy. I will not mention paradigms. I will simply tell them that we are confused, and that we should probably start by figuring out what we are actually trying to make. It’s a small start, a 9-word manifesto against the fog, but it feels more honest than anything I’ve said in years. What would happen if we all just said what we meant? The silence would be deafening, but at least we could finally hear the ticking of the clock.