Im quietly judging you for using jargon at work

Im quietly judging you for using jargon at workIm quietly judging you for using jargon at workWhen reports came out today that Ford Motor could lay off 20,000 workers in North America and Asia, the company denied any plans for people-efficiency actions.Excuse us? People-efficiency actions?Ford is not the first, or even the most creative, to find new euphemisms for firing people. In the United Kingdom, layoffs are routinely called redundancies, a chilly dismissal indeed. Bank of America once termed its executive restructuring as a de-layering, implying some kind of executive-level exfoliation.You know the drill efficiencies, workforce rationalization, pivots.Call it corporatespeak, business garble, office gobbledygook, whatever. The peculiar affliction that causes otherwise professional people to say circle back instead of check back later. Or at this juncture instead of now. Or my personal favorite, touch kusine instead of speak again at a later date.Its bad enough to go through corp orate changes why must we also be lost in translation? Would it be so bad for managers to just say what they mean?Hiding behind words to protect ourselvesIn the same way that mens shirt collars represent ways to protect the throat from attackers, obfuscating language protects us from the consequences of our speech, shielding us from the blast of emotions through chilly, dry words.For example We use strategic foresight tools to identify clients previously unseen opportunities. Then effectively communicate that differentiation to their stakeholders, using our proven thought leadership methodology.Or how about We bring deep, functional expertise, but are known for our holistic perspective we capture value across boundaries and between the silos of any organization.elend even job descriptions are immune.Serves as a point of contact for functions relating to the social impact mission may negotiate at all levels of management to secure input from an array of diverse units to achieve parti cular social impact goals.Id think about applying for that job, but I dont actually know what Id be doing.The cocoon of meaningless wordsI once worked in an office where touch base got used a lot. To amuse myself, I pretended that it was a euphemism for having sex. It made the conversations I overheard a lot more entertaining.Eavesdropper entertainment aside, corporate communications professionals have mixed feelings about corporatespeak. Barbara Coward is the founder of Enrollment Strategies, a company that helps MBA candidates get into top schools and top schools recruit the best MBA candidates. She said that corporatespeak can be a quick way to get a message across.Were living in a real fast-paced environment, Coward said. Corporatespeak is a shortcut.When corporate jargon hurts us most in the job searchThe problem arises when the language shortcut leads straight to a communication dead end. This is a particular danger for people who are changing careers, Coward said. Job-hunting can quickly become fraught.If youre working in an emergency room, stop the bleeding means something different than if youre working at Amazon, she said. If youre switching sectors, thats something you need to keep in mind.Elizabeth Tarner, president of Tarner and Associates, said that corporatespeak can help build rapport among people internally, but using buzzwords with people who arent familiar with them can mean theyre trying so hard to figure out what youre talking about that theyre not hearing what youre actually saying. Thats a huge barrier that could cause misunderstandings later.The cloudiness is especially apparent when it comes to abbreviations and acronyms.Clarity is a big issue it really is, she said. Even people who have really good communication skills arent really clear all the time.Even communication experts get tripped up sometimes. Tarner said years ago one of her students used LOL in an email. She thought it meant lots of love and was baffled by the excessive af fection.And after seven years as a stay-at-home mom, Coward was once in a meeting with executives from Northrop Grumman, who were talking about C-level executives. She thought they were discussing sea-level executives, which makes sense given Northrop Grummans naval products.Ahoy.The real problem we dont ask what it all meansWhen you dont understand something, You feel silly or stupid asking what that means, Coward said. Its all about taking the time to really communicate and really understand one another.Lets be completely honest here. I contacted a couple of linguists expecting that theyd back up my own personal thesis that corporatespeak is awful and terrible and nobody who wants to be understood should ever use it.It didnt quite work out that way.In fact, I learned that terrible corporatespeak actually serves the almost tribal purpose to allowing experts to communicate easily with each other.Corporate speak falls under the category that linguists would call jargon. Its the speci alized language used in a field or area of knowledge, and it applies equally to rocket scientists and surfers, said Carmen Fought, a linguistics professor at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. Anybody who has a specialized knowledge of an area has a specific way of talking about particular concepts that are important.Kirk Hazen, linguistics professor at West Virginia University, agreed. He said its completely natural that groups develop ways of talking that are specific to that group and also completely natural that other groups complain about it.This is a process that all humans do, he said. Every generation develops new slang. Its very old in Western culture to complain about teenagers making new slang.The annoyance people feel is probably due in part to the discomfort of being part of the out group, Hazen said. He said its not so different from when an eager 18-year-old heads off to college. They might come back for Thanksgiving break bearing not just loads of literal dirty la undry, but also new words, opinions and experiences, which can be alienating to parents or others at home.Its more than just words. Its about community and culture, he said. If those differences are highlighted, then sometimes people can react negatively.There are no new language complaints under the sunHazen said that concerns about corporatespeak and other language trends tend to come in waves. He said hes noticed an uptick in hand-wringing over workplace jargon in the past year or so. In previous years, the controversies were around texting, or ebonics.That doesnt mean that jargon never causes problems, Hazen and Fought both said. In particular, cross-cultural communication is more difficult if people are using corporatespeak, because idioms or expressions that cant be deciphered through words alone, like raining cats and dogs are notoriously difficult to translate.An expression like time is money makes perfect sense to us but might seem strange in, lets say a South American cu lture where the idea of time is more flexible, Fought said. And even linguists who understand its utility and appreciate how languages evolve admit to being annoyed by corporatespeak occasionally.Not being a member of a corporation, the whole idea irritates me, and I could see how an outsider to that culture might find it annoying in the sense of wanting people to just say what they mean instead of dressing it up with these fancy words, Fought said.Still, shes not judging.Despite what others might think, linguists are the least judgmental people on the planet about language, she said. We can have personal opinions like anyone else, but when were in a professional capacity, we know that everything that happens with language happens for a reason, and our job is to understand it, not judge it.You can say that again.