Corporate Buzzwords Are How Workers Pretend to Be Adults via The Atlantic

Corporate Buzzwords Are How Workers Pretend to Be Adults

Circle back and kill me now.

The Atlantic:  2.19.2020 by Olga Khazan

If there’s anything corporate America 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 “monetization 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 organizations, which always seem to want to arm “stakeholders” with tools for their “tool boxes.” 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.)

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When I recently asked on Twitter about everyone’s least favorite 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!” in much the same way an Ann Taylor getup does. 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, the Copenhagen Business School professor Mary Yoko Brannen told me. One of the most important elements of culture is language.

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.  READ MORE ➤➤

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