My left molars have started to ache every time I hear the word ‘synergy.’ It’s a physical reaction now, a sort of somatic protest against the hollowing out of the English language. I was sitting in a windowless boardroom last Thursday, the 24th of the month, watching a consultant point a laser at a slide that featured 4 concentric circles. He said, ‘We need to actionize our learnings to optimize the value-add proposition moving forward.’ I nodded. I didn’t just nod; I leaned in with an expression of profound intellectual curiosity. I was a participant in the crime. I knew, and he knew, and the 44 other people in the regional Slack channel knew, that he hadn’t actually said anything at all. He was just blowing linguistic smoke into a room already choked with it.

Language as a Lifeline in Reality

I spent a long afternoon recently with River J.-P., a refugee resettlement advisor who deals with the kind of reality that doesn’t allow for ‘blue-sky thinking.’ River’s job involves finding beds for people who have crossed oceans with nothing but a plastic bag of documents. In River’s world, language is a lifeline. If a form says ‘facilitate,’ and the person reading it only knows the word ‘help,’ the system breaks. River told me about a government document that used the phrase ‘transitional housing optimization’ 14 times.

‘They just mean a roof,’ River said, rubbing their temples. ‘But if they call it a roof, they have to admit when the roof is leaking. If they call it a transitional optimization, then a leak is just a variable in the delivery flow.’

– River J.-P., Resettlement Advisor

It reminded me of my own spectacular failure three weeks ago when I tried to explain cryptocurrency to my grandmother. I realized halfway through that I was using words like ‘decentralized ledger’ and ‘smart contracts’ not to help her understand, but to cover up the gaps in my own knowledge. I was jargon-shaming her into silence so she wouldn’t ask the one question I couldn’t answer: ‘Where is the actual money, dear?’ We use big words when we are afraid of the small ones. We use ‘bandwidth’ because saying ‘I am too tired and overwhelmed to help you’ feels too vulnerable. We use ‘deep dive’ because ‘I need to actually read this 44-page report’ sounds like a chore.

The Recursive Loop of Nothingness

This linguistic rot has a real-world cost. When you can’t describe your job in words a ten-year-old would understand, you probably don’t understand your job. Or worse, your job doesn’t need to exist. I’ve seen entire departments dedicated to ‘strategic alignment.’ What do they do? They align strategies. How? Through alignment meetings. It’s a recursive loop of nothingness. It’s a hall of mirrors where the only output is more mirrors. We’ve reached a point where ‘low-hanging fruit’ is a staple of our diet, and ‘moving the needle’ is our only form of exercise. It’s exhausting. It’s a weight on the brain that eventually turns into a dull, permanent numbness.

I think about the clarity of manual labor sometimes. There is a profound, almost spiritual honesty in work that results in a visible change in the physical world. Companies like the Norfolk Cleaning Group operate in a realm where jargon dies on contact with reality. You can’t ‘optimize’ a vacuum cleaner into doing the work for you through ‘synergistic floor-care strategies.’ You just have to push the machine. There is no ‘value-add proposition’ for a window that is still covered in streaks. There is only the work, the result, and the clear language that connects them. We’ve become so used to the ‘narrative’ and the ‘pivot’ that we’ve forgotten the dignity of a job well described.

The Corporate Fear of Being Seen

Why are we so afraid of being plain? Perhaps because plainness is intimate. To speak clearly is to be seen. If I tell you that my ‘core competency’ is ‘digital storytelling,’ I’m presenting a brand. If I tell you that I like to write stories about how people feel when they’re lonely, I’m presenting a soul. The corporate world hates souls. Souls are messy. They have ‘unplanned downtime’ (they cry). They have ‘resource constraints’ (they get tired). They don’t ‘scale’ (they are unique). So we wrap ourselves in the Kevlar of ‘professionalism.’ We ‘circle back’ instead of saying ‘I forgot about you.’ We ‘take this offline’ instead of saying ‘you’re making me uncomfortable in front of the others.’

There was a precision in that language that felt like a cool breeze in a room full of farts. It was 4:44 PM when the family finally signed the lease, and for a second, the jargon of ‘occupancy’ and ‘residential compliance’ vanished. It was just a key hitting a table. A sharp, clear sound.

– Observation of River J.-P.’s work

The Manual De-Colonization Process

If we want to save our brains, we have to start a manual de-colonization process. We have to be brave enough to sound simple. The next time someone asks you for your ‘takeaways’ from a meeting, tell them what you actually learned. If you learned nothing, say you learned nothing. It will be terrifying. The silence that follows a plain truth in a corporate setting is the loudest sound in the world. It’s the sound of the fog lifting.

I’ve tried to be better. I’ve tried to catch myself before I say ‘reach out’ and say ‘call’ instead. It’s harder than it looks. The jargon is a habit, a verbal tic that we use to signal that we belong to the tribe of the Busy and Important. But we aren’t that important. Most of what we do will be forgotten in 4 years, let alone 44. The only thing that stays is how we communicated with the people around us. Did we actually reach them, or did we just send a ‘ping’ into the void?

We are drowning in a sea of ‘deliverables’ and ‘milestones,’ forgetting that a milestone is just a rock on the side of the road. It tells you how far you’ve gone, but it doesn’t tell you why you’re walking. We need more ‘why’ and less ‘how we might leverage the why.’ We need to stop ‘ideating’ and start thinking. Thinking is harder. It requires us to face the gaps in our logic. It requires us to admit that we don’t always have the ‘bandwidth’ to be ‘best-in-class.’

The Most Productive 4 Seconds

There is a specific kind of freedom in admitting you don’t know what a word means. I did it yesterday. A junior analyst told me we needed to ‘socialize the deck’ before the ‘all-hands.’ I looked at him and said, ‘I don’t know what that means. Do you want me to show people the slides?’ He paused. He looked confused for exactly 4 seconds. Then he smiled. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Just show them the slides.’ The world didn’t end. The company didn’t collapse. The value-add didn’t diminish. We just understood each other for a moment, two humans standing in a hallway, speaking a language that our ancestors would have recognized. It was the most productive 4 seconds of my entire week.

The Freedom of Clarity

Maybe the goal shouldn’t be to ‘disrupt the industry.’ Maybe the goal should be to describe the industry in a way that doesn’t make us want to scream into a pillow at 10:04 PM every Monday. We are more than our ‘verticals.’ We are more than our ‘KPIs.’ We are people who want to do something that matters, or at the very least, something that makes sense. And if we can’t find a way to say that simply, then we really aren’t saying anything at all.