Speak English, Dammit
Why has jargon become the language of business?
From NP Biz Magazine, December 2000

In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell wrote that language, "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." Spent any time in the new economy crossword puzzle? Things are definitely doubleplusungood.

The language of business is fast becoming a kind of torture chamber for plain English. Clear, comprehensible words enter; horrifically disfigured and unrecognizable phrases stumble out: management bandwidth; acquisition lockdown; mindshare; stickiness; point of contact; vector; push back; tear down; granularity. Please somebody, stop them before they neologize again.

Business has always had buzzwords, and this isn't the first time diction or intention have been obscured by sloppy verbiage. In his 1978 book, The Jargon of the Professions, Kenneth Hudson noted that "Business is subject to two quite different linguistic pressures. On the one hand, there is the never-ending search for the new, even more arresting phrase . . . and on the other, the wish to tone words down, to make them less dangerous, less precise, less likely to blow up in the face of the person who uses them." This has never been truer than it is today: in 1978, business was still largely conducted in English; these days, it's done in a kind of impenetrable Esperanto. The worst examples of e-lingo combine what Hudson described, at once impressing people with their futurism ("vortal") while insulating the speaker from actually having an opinion that might later prove unpopular or incorrect.

Language is the filter through which we describe reality, but when it comes to dot-com-speak, unreality is the result. What do words like reskin or envisioneer really mean, beyond proving that the person saying them has found the time to skim through Fast Company?

The problem is less the existence of jargon, which can act as verbal shorthand between like-minded professionals, than the proliferation of nonsense jargon, words that appear to have no clearly defined meaning. This inflated language strives to make the ordinary extraordinary, or, as Orwell put it, "give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Both of which are good descriptors for the new economy, where an entire lexicon has emerged to help obscure the fact that most web-based enterprises are still in the widget business - sorry, "clicks-and-mortar." Sadly, Internet start-ups are often too harried trying to become the beneficiary of the IPO fairy to find the time to question their most cherished words and phrases.

Given an uncritiqued column inch, some writers are producing a mile of meaningless prose, best witnessed in the recent and buzz-ridden book, Funky Business. Swedish authors Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordstrom brag about their funky bald heads and black leather pants to reinforce their funky, revolutionary theories about business. To prove their rather intriguing theory that "talent makes capital dance," and in lieu of case studies and statistics, they create words like infomediaries, heart share, staminacs, prosumption, heterarchical and hyphe-nation. After reading about CDOs (chief destruction officers) or phrase after phrase like "funky leaders are creators of chaos as much as originators of order," one cannot help but recall Orwell's dystopic Nineteen Eighty-Four. Phrases like "war is peace," "freedom is slavery" and "ignorance is strength" require nearly the same mental gymnastics to unpack as the "funked up" assertion that "total innovation requires ignoring and listening to the customer."

Normally, when a business word or phrase crosses over into popular culture, it acts as a eulogy. But despite Edward Norton's world-weary "Do you want me to deprioritize my current reports until you advise of a status upgrade?" in Fight Club, and the occasional Dilbert pot-shot, e-lingo continues to thrive. The Jargon Watch column in Wired magazine ends up legitimizing the problem rather than ridiculing it.

Then again, maybe the Web is self-governing enough to solve the problems it generated. There are sites devoted to Lingo Bingo, e-lingo dictionaries (www.polarisconsulting.com) and the web economy bullshit generator (WEBG), provided by www.dack.com. The WEBG randomly combines the most common nonsense words to create uniquely meaningless phrases of unintentional hilarity: implement integrated niches; exploit granular eyeballs; streamline vector convergence. When a Java applet sounds as bleeding-edge as a real person, perhaps it's time to declare e-lingo, like Latin, a dead language.