Corporate jargon: understanding and using business English

- It's Monday morning, and you open your email

to find your boss just looping you in on a new thread.

Maybe a client wants to pivot

their strategy for next quarter,

so we're gonna need you to go ahead and drill down

on the data from the last campaign,

and maybe share some key takeaways in tomorrow's standup.

No matter how much you roll your eyes reading that email,

you can't help but reply

that you'll do a deep dive and circle back.

All that corporate lingo occupies a weird space

in language where nobody likes it, but everybody does it.

So why can't we resist the pull

of talking like sad, beige robots

as soon as we step into an office building,

and where did all the synergy speak come from

in the first place?

I'm Dr. Erica Brozovsky, and this is "Otherwords."

(upbeat funk music)

- "Otherwords."

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- To linguists, all that awkward office speak

can be categorized as a jargon,

or the technical vocabulary that is specific

to members of a career field or activity.

Jargon is meant to make communication

more precise and efficient

for members of the in-group that uses it,

even if it makes no sense to outsiders.

And like all language,

corporate jargon has gone through waves of evolution.

The office jargon we know and love to hate today

started to emerge at the end of World War II,

as businesses took advantage

of the post-war economic prosperity,

switching up the production efforts from tanks and planes

to cars and refrigerators.

When veterans returned home and got jobs

at these growing corporate conglomerates,

they brought a lot of military jargon with them.

The wartime origins are apparent

in phrases like "boots on the ground" or "mission critical,"

but deploying software, attending an all-hands meeting,

even talking about a business strategy or a sales tactic,

uses language borrowed from the battlefield.

Some more examples you could encounter

as you rise through the ranks of corporate culture

include "on my radar," "in the trenches,"

"rally the troops," or "fight an uphill battle."

Around the same time, sports terminology

entered the corporate world and stuck around.

A great idea can be a slam dunk or a home run,

where a bad one might come out of left field.

I might say a task that I'm competent or skilled at

is in my wheelhouse, but in 1959, a wheelhouse was the zone

where a baseball player was most likely

to, well, knock it out of the park,

and "across the board" doesn't just mean widespread,

it comes from a type of bet

that spectators could place on horse races.

Perhaps all the sporty slang

that worked its way into office culture

around the mid-century says something

about how workers viewed business as a competition,

or about the interests of the people

most likely to hold office jobs in that era.

Military and sports terminology

aren't the only job-specific jargon

that came into more general use.

We often adopt language from whatever industry

is the most glamorous at the time.

Take advertising in the '60s,

which gave us "run it up the flagpole"

as a term for testing how consumers would react

to marketing messages.

In the '80s, the finance industry gave us "leverage,"

"return on investment," and even "low-hanging fruit"

as shorthand for relatively easy changes

that can produce quick results.

In the 2000s, tech startups that shook up the status quo

gave us language like "hack" and "disrupt,"

and the computing technology they used

spilled over into describing human communication.

Think, "Do you have the bandwidth for this?"

Or, "Let's double-click on that."

And, sidebar, you may notice

that while some corporate jargon is technical and specific,

other common office lingo is pretty vague.

You could table something or take it offline

instead of straight-up saying, "No,"

or, "We're not firing everyone,

we're just doing some restructuring and need to downsize."

When delivering information directly

could cause conflict or low morale,

corporate jargon can make a user's language

less clear on purpose.

We like to cloak difficult information in jargon

for the same reasons that we're so quick to incorporate

whatever the hot, new, exciting field is saying

and bring it back to our own jobs,

because jargon isn't just about communicating information,

it's also about communicating power and status.

Sociolinguists argue that word choice plays a role

in expressing power dynamics between speakers.

We may use technical jargon in front of someone

who isn't familiar with it

in an attempt to show off our membership

in a powerful in-group.

Employees who know what ROIs, or KPIs,

or even what OOO means can demonstrate that they belong.

Workers who don't speak the language may not fit in.

Status signaling is a major part

of what keeps corporate jargon going,

even when many employees agree that it's pretty annoying.

As we covered in our episode on cult language,

researchers found that workers

who have lower status in a workplace,

like people who are newer in their careers,

use jargon more often than people

who are higher up the corporate ladder,

as they try to compensate for their lack of experience,

so instead of corporate language

falling out of favor over time,

each new generation that enters the workforce

reinforces the existing jargon by using it a lot.

There's a chance that Gen-Z-ers

could change this pattern, though.

A 2023 survey conducted by LinkedIn

showed that while Millennials

report using corporate jargon the most,

60% of Gen-Z-ers hope to eliminate it altogether.

Maybe graduating into a workplace culture

of Zoom meetings and hybrid schedules

could reduce some of the social pressure to conform

to other long-standing office norms like corporate jargon,

but we'll have to circle back on that.

(relaxed electronic music)

So it's...

(relaxed electronic music)

You want me to, like, roll my eyes?

60% of Gen-Z-ers hope to eliminate it altogether.

I have to sneeze. I think.

(Erica sneezing)