corporate jargon equals verbal play doh
Jargon hides our lack of understanding. When forced to write out an idea from start to finish in simple language, you discover where you struggle … where it doesn’t quite make sense … where you get frustrated … where you don’t really understand as well as you thought. Only by identifying gaps in your knowledge can you fill them.
Farnam Street • The Feynman Technique: Master the Art of Learning
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
... See moreMolly Young • Why do corporations speak the way they do?
It might be surprising to you that an organization known for cutting edge technology cares so much about something as soft and abstract as language and how it makes people feel — and that’s exactly why we’re sharing these tips. Everyone has the potential to be brave, audacious, and radically creative, but we often put ceilings on ourselves with min
... See moreCourtney Hohne • The monkey, the tiger beetle and the language of innovation
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
... 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
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
... See moreMolly Young • Why do corporations speak the way they do?
My generic career advice for young people is that if at all possible, you should aim to work on something that no one has a word for. Spend your energies where we don’t have a name for what you are doing, where it takes a while to explain to your mother what it is you do. When you are ahead of language, that means you are in a spot where it is mor
... See moreNoah Smith • Interview: Kevin Kelly, Editor, Author, and Futurist
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.