corporate jargon equals verbal play doh
by alexi gunner · updated 2mo ago
corporate jargon equals verbal play doh
by alexi gunner · updated 2mo ago
Beyond their meaning, words also differ according to how easy they are to pronounce. People generally prefer not to think more than necessary, and they tend to prefer objects, people, products, and words that are simple to pronounce and understand. In 2006, my colleague Daniel Oppenheimer and I investigated the performance of hundreds of stocks imm
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At my own workplaces, the New Age–speak mingled recklessly with aviation metaphors ( holding pattern, the concept of discussing something at the 30,000-foot level), verbs and adjectives shoved into nounhood ( ask, win, fail, refresh, regroup, creative, sync, touchbase ), nouns shoved into verbhood ( whiteboard, bucket ), and a heap of nonwords that
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And yet it should be possible to gaze into this alphabet soup and divine patterns. Our attraction to certain words surely reflects an inner yearning. Computer metaphors appeal to us because they imply futurism and hyperefficiency, while the language of self-empowerment hides a deeper anxiety about our relationship to work — a sense that what we’re
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And so with every exchange, you have to acknowledge a reality where words like optionality and deliverable could be just as solid as blimp and pretzel. What happens if you ask a Megan or a Steph Korey or an Adam Neumann what they mean? I imagine a box with a series of false bottoms; you just keep falling deeper and deeper into gibberish. The meanin
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