hodgsonConsulting

Dec. 12 5:38 pm - Post by Brendan Magee

Does the title of this piece look familiar? It should, because it’s chock-full of nonsensical business jargon, the sort of stuff you and I read and hear on a daily basis. The sentence above falls under the heading of what Dan Pallotta of the Harvard Business Review Blog Network has creatively labeled “Abstract Valley Girl 2.0 Acronymitis Using Meaningless Expressions.” Here’s another great example of the same kind of gobbledygook, courtesy of Hodgson developer Vlad Oprică: “When you’re called to an on-site meeting, you need to go in guns blazing and establish some key takeaways before someone can start raising all the red flags.”

As you can see, Vlad has written this very tongue-in-cheek sentence using almost entirely what he and I would both consider incredibly trite vocabulary, yet these words seem to comprise the majority of expressions in business writing today.[†] At this point, you might be thinking, “What’s so bad about this stuff?” My response would be that this lingo is rotten precisely because it’s aimed at creating needlessly complicated, oblique ways to express simple, easily understood concepts. Bland expressions can cause eyes to glaze over and minds to wander, thus defeating the primary purpose of language: communication.

Unfortunately, this sort of diction isn’t confined to internal discussions about “marketing initiatives” or the like, wherein only one’s coworkers are made to suffer; it has crept into the “public-facing” (another cringe-worthy term) areas of our businesses as well. Entrepreneur Jason Fried explains the problem: “Years of language dilution by lawyers, marketers, executives, and HR departments have turned the powerful, descriptive sentence into an empty vessel optimized for buzzwords, jargon, and vapid expressions.” Alas, it remains far easier to pull out a stock expression thoughtlessly than to consider an idea carefully before expressing it.

Due to my own fastidious nature as a writer, I’m acutely—maybe painfully—aware of how this sort of terminology has been insinuating itself into my own vocabulary. I’ve attempted to stem the tide a bit by taking great pains to bring variety to my writing, even at the cost of sounding like a pretentious, ivory tower academic.[‡] Nevertheless, when one’s work environment is suffused with this dreadful commercial cant, it’s nigh impossible to avoid the temptation to describe what I’m doing right now as “content creation” instead of “writing.”

At first glance, it may seem that there’s no escaping the insipid nonsense that is modern business writing, but don’t despair! For those of us who are aware of the problem at hand, there is a ready solution available in the form of a website that translates esoteric or stale terminology into more comprehensible language. One of my favorite examples from this site is the definition for the term “content,” a word that I use without irony on a daily basis: content is “undifferentiated sludge created to spackle over business problems. Often comes in buckets. Also, articles, videos, or images.” Brilliant stuff.

The above website (the title of which, while apropos, I’ve omitted from this piece for the sake of decorum) should be an excellent resource for anyone revamping his or her company’s marketing copy. The site is wonderful for the same reason that all high-quality satire is wonderful: it holds up a mirror to our society and forces us to come to terms with the blemishes we might otherwise ignore. The best kind of satire is funny without sacrificing its message, because the ultimate goal is to effect a change.

It’s possible that the creators of this dictionary of bad business vocabulary were inspired by American journalist and author Ambrose Bierce. This Civil War veteran was a lifelong cynic, endowed with such a caustic wit that he was dubbed “Bitter Bierce” by contemporaries. One of Bierce’s most famous contributions to the corpus of American literature is The Devil’s Dictionary, a collection of sarcastic definitions for commonly used words (well, they were commonly used words in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). As “economy” currently seems to be the most overused word in modern American political discourse, I’ll share Bierce’s lexicographical entry on that term:

ECONOMY, n. Purchasing the barrel of whiskey that you do not need for the price of the cow that you cannot afford.

I should be clear in writing this piece that I am just as guilty of using bad business language as anyone else. Likewise, any ridicule implied herein is directed as much at me as at anyone else in this world of “pain points” and “social media gurus.” I’ve long been a proponent of self-effacing humor, especially if it leads to positive developments. From this point forth, I’m going to take upon myself the challenge of writing vibrant prose without sacrificing effectiveness—I invite you to join me in what I hope will not amount to yet another exercise in futility.