Meaningless words

Currently, the English language has 171,476 words, and the average person uses about 7000 words a day (plus a couple more as your Wordle guesses).

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In 2021 we added ten more words.

e?????Adulting: The action of becoming, or acting like an adult

e?????Awe walk: Taking a walk outside and making an effort to look at the things around you

e?????Contactless: denoting a smart card that uses radio signals to provide a wireless connection to a card reader, so that no physical contact is necessary

e?????Doomscrolling:?the tendency to continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening, or depressing

e?????PPE: short for?personal protective equipment.

e?????Quarenteen

e?????Thirsty

e?????Truthiness

e?????Unconscious biases?

e?????AND work from home

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This evolving language made me think about how words lose meaning – whether through repetition (seriously try it) or through the evolution of the world around us. For instance – “hybrid”. Two elements that come together to make a new thing. So you have a hybrid car – part electric part fuel. They’re everywhere. They’re almost the standard at this point. At what point is a hybrid car just a car?

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It’s same with “hybrid work”- defined as “a type of blended workforce comprising employees who work remotely and those who work from an office or central location”. To me, this is just called “work”. When did work become a noun and not a verb? It’s an activity, not a location. It happens everywhere. All the time. This isn’t to say that we should work everywhere and all the time! To the contrary; it means we work when the work needs to be done, or when we are in a space to be creative and productive. There is such an emphasis on the location of work and a lack of attention to the nature of work.

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Another word that’s been used and used and used and used again is “collaboration”. It’s so often used as a description of a work mode, but at the end of the day – isn’t that just work? “The action of working with someone to produce or create something.” That’s…work. So why do we feel the need to assign unique terms to a task we all do? Part of it stems from just trying to understand behavior. Labels help with that! But it’s also a way to sound informed, or ahead of trends. And I get that. There’s a lot of uncertainty right now, and a lot of people are looking for direction and guidance. It’s scary to say we don’t know what the future holds. But it’s also the truth. We don’t know. What we do know is that work happens everywhere. We know that people need the tools and environments to make working feel good. This is enough. Being Future Smart means be ready for change, in whatever form or term or definition it comes.?