corporate jargon equals verbal play doh
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
... See moreMolly Young • Why do corporations speak the way they do?
Sometimes I think of it in this way: if the words already exist to describe something new then maybe it is not truly that novel after all.
Internet Blue • "Disregard the Words"
On the one hand, language is a wonderful tool. It allows us to describe these other worlds in metaphors that help us think and imagine them. But there are many places where our language leaves us in the lurch. Like with vision, we don’t have a word for detecting light but not having a conscious experience of it.
ed yong • What Counts as Seeing
This has turned communicators of all kinds – from fashion influencers to public health specialists – into Kremlinologists who obsessively analyze the behavior of social media algorithms in the hopes of learning how to please them and (more importantly) how to avoid their punishments.
Hence algospeak. Social media users have learned the hard way that... See more
Hence algospeak. Social media users have learned the hard way that... See more
Cory Doctorow • Pluralistic: 11 Apr 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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
... See moreMolly Young • Why do corporations speak the way they do?
These words, past their initial intrigue, offer us a looking glass into specific cultures. After all, for a culture to come up with a word, something must happen often enough. And for it not to exist in other cultures, it must not have passed that intangible threshold. This very concept means that with untranslatables, we very likely experiencing a... See more
Steph Smith • Gaining Perspective Through Untranslatable Words
Helfand compiled a list of commonly bandied-about words and divided them into categories like Hyphenated Mash-ups ( omni-channel, level-setting, business-critical ), Compound Phrases ( email blast, integrated deck, pain point, deep dive ) and Conceptual Hybrids (“shooting” someone an email, “looping” someone in)
Molly Young • Why do corporations speak the way they do?
Chosen carefully, words don’t just describe innovation; they enable it.