Ducks Don't Like Buzzwords

Hello Human

‘I hope my Muse here finds you well’.

Even if I am about to ‘disrupt your status quo’.

Hey, ‘heads up’, there are some mildly amusing ‘office and corporate-lingo ick’ clips on Tik Tok currently.

Tik Tok Mark?

Yep - Tik Tok.

Just in case you’ve been on another planet for the last few years - Tik Tok is ‘the social media platform designed for creating, editing, and sharing short videos between 15 seconds and three minutes in length’.

Let’s get back on the topic for today though - ‘office and corporate-lingo icks’ - we all have them - aka buzzwords - we all use them.

We use them so much and so often I reckon we’ve forgotten - that they are buzzwords. Have you been ‘deep diving’ lately? ‘Taking things offline’ while you ‘peel the onion’ and ‘drill down’ perhaps? ‘Marinating’ over the outcome of your last meeting, while you figure out how to ‘get your ducks in a row’? Speaking of meetings, when did consecutive become ‘back-to-back’?

When you’ve ‘synergised’ all of that with ‘speed and efficiency’, ‘ping’ me, and I am certain we’ll be ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’ about the ‘pain points’.

We may even be able to ‘ideate’ over ‘new ways of working’.

What the (absolute) f@$k is going on? Tik Tok brought me here, but this buzzword disease took hold in organisations way before Tik Tok was thought about.

‘Circle back’ and kill me now.

Circle back and kill me now’ was the by-line in an article on Buzzwords written in The Atlantic back in 2020. The headline of that same article:

“Corporate Buzzwords Are How Workers Pretend to Be Adults”

Pretending to be adults!

I like it.

In the article, The Atlantic’s staff writer Olga Khazan captures the essence of buzzwords this way:

“Not quite a cliché, not quite a term of art, a buzzword is a profound-seeming phrase devised by someone important to make something sound better than it is.”

Profound-seeming (buzz) words make things sound better than they are. Buzzwords:

● Born from the artifice of the office.

● Marking the boundary between the work us and the non-work us.

● Clear evidence that we fit in - that we are part of the tribe.

● Useful for dressing up otherwise pointless activities and tasks.

I like Gretchen McCulloch’s (Internet Linguist) point of view on the buzzword and jargon phenomenon.

McCulloch says;

‘The words are just euphemisms for all the frustrations we harbour about work… If you find corporate buzzwords annoying, it’s probably because you find work annoying… The words themselves are innocent bystanders in your frustration, but it’s easier to take those frustrations

out on a phrase than it is to admit that you’re annoyed with this other person, and you don’t enjoy email, and you wish you could just swear at the other person’.

Here’s another neat perspective on buzzwords and organisational jargon from Geoff Pullum (Professor of general linguistics at the University of Edinburgh):

“A word like ‘synergy’ that inspires ire is not harmful in itself. The word has been in use since at least 1850. Meanings evolve, rather slowly. The people who suddenly turn on [these words] as ‘jargon’ are being irrational.”

Human - I’ll leave you to think all of this through and contemplate swearing at your irrational jargon inventing work ‘friends’ because work is simply annoying for you. I encourage you to do your little bit in the world of work to keep it simple and keep it real. Dare I say; keep it human.

Hey, I’d love to keep typing but I need to ‘rightsize’ the word count of my Muse here and ‘close the loop’ on it.

‘Reach out’ if you want to continue the ‘dialogue’ after you’ve ‘digested the learnings’.

Go well, Human