It’s Not Supposed to be “Jargon”

Thinker: I took a class at the design school on creativity and innovation today. It’s cool to play with post-its but it felt a bit like we were drinking the ideation kool-aid.

Cynic: “Ideation!” That is my favorite word at work! No wait. “Pivot” feels much more contemporary. A killer idea is not enough. To make it actionable, you need to pivot.

Pragmatist: What the hell does that even mean?!

Cynic: It’s all just a bunch of corporate lingo that’s infested everyday language. Jargon.

Thinker: Well, jargon didn’t always have such a bad rep. According to Wikipedia, “jargon” was first coined in 1782. It was technical language for specific activities. Somewhere between then and now, it’s moved out of specialist fields and into popular culture.

Pragmatist: I feel that jargon has a social dimension these days. It’s an “in-speak” that marks out whether you belong or not. You use it to show off your knowledge.

Cynic: Or to hide the fact that you’re clueless. Haven’t people always used the in-speak of dialects and lexicons to include and exclude?

Thinker: Yes, and jargon’s a subset of that. People include and exclude based on race, gender, ethnicity, geography, etc. Jargon’s the in-speak of expertise. It used to be the language of the knowledge elite; it’s now the language of the professional elite.

Cynic: In-speak’s supposed to hide the truth from outsiders but let insiders share it. Corporate jargon is fuzzy blah blah that no one can agree on in terms of its exact meaning. Just what exactly does “engagement” mean? Give me a “vision” and I’ll say you need a “mission” except someone else will say that what you really need is a “purpose.”

Thinker: That’s ironic seeing as jargon was originally supposed to clarify meaning—at least to the few in the specialist fields.

The Evolution of Jargon

Cynic: Well, it looks like we’ve democratized access and voided meaning. Such is the progress of modernity.

Thinker: Actually, I do think that modernity’s got a lot to do with it. Jargon’s evolution from specialized to more general language reflects the formation and breaking down of social/class divisions.

Cynic: Well, look. We have a Marxist in our midst.

Thinker: Jargon’s a social signifier. The word itself didn’t come into vogue until the eighteenth century. And, that’s because we didn’t have a knowledge elite until the Industrial Revolution.

Pragmatist: But, surely we’ve had knowledge elites throughout history? The philosophers of Ancient Greece, the mathematicians of ancient India, the poets of Imperial China, the great artists of the Renaissance, etc.

Thinker: Yes but they didn’t hold real power—political clout. Thinkers and artists were respected for their mind but still depended on patrons who were aristocrats or merchant princes. With the Industrial Revolution, technology was power. It raised living standards, powered conquests and made cultural products more widely accessible. It created a middle class that looked up to knowledge as a liberator. The scientific elite led material progress and the literary elite set cultural agenda.

Pragmatist: So, jargon was born when the awe of the middle classes endowed the knowledge elite with actual power. What happened since then? How did class structure change and jargon along with it?

Thinker: After the Industrial Revolution, social structures more or less stayed put until the next massive social upheaval—the two World Wars. Rigid class structure was demolished and mass production became king, which paved the way for post-war consumer and pop culture. That’s when jargon became more widespread.

Pragmatist: How?

Thinker: Through business and marketing. Corporations ballooned and a new breed of experts—consultants, business gurus, marketers, creative hotshots etc.—needed their own “technical” lingo.

Corporate Jargon—Making What’s Easy Look Hard

Cynic: But corporate jargon’s used beyond the corporate world these days. Why has it spread like a virus?

Thinker: Probably because it’s easy. The terms themselves are like “real words” and everyone can pick them up. “Synergy,” “value add,” and “leverage”  might sound exotic at first, but you’ll find yourself reeling them off in no time. Not so with “pluronic triblock copolymers.”

Cynic: Fair enough. So, if corporate jargon’s easy, it’s meaning should be clear as day-right? Wrong.

Pragmatist: I’ve a feeling that corporate jargon is intentionally unclear. After all, business isn’t that technical. A lot of it is common sense and experience. Anyone could be an expert. So how do you tell who’s the real expert? Follow the jargon.

Cynic: Anyone can talk about making things, doing things, and thinking of new ideas etc. But he who advocates “value creation,” “strategic execution” and “disruptive ideation” is special. Gifted with the ability to turn simple concepts into complex BS.

Thinker: And, that’s why everyone’s competing to push their own version of corporate jargon. “Corporate social responsibility” jostles against ’‘sustainability” and “corporate citizenship.” Yesterday was all about “delivering value,” today we’ve moved onto “creating impact.” We’re all trying to stand out with our own jargon.

Cynic: So jargon’s an attempt to identify experts in business fields where expertise has been democratized. Oh, the irony.

Thinker: It may be that the ability to learn jargon is democratizing. Social scientists talk about code-switching—you speak Black English at home but come into the office or the university and talk of  “leveraging actionable criteria,” or “measuring the validity of your qualitative analysis.”

Cynic: Yeah, but all this is just a sham. A game of words, between the player, the played…and the boss. Because, in the end, power speaks.

Pragmatist: Right, like in a meeting, the CEO will talk about “aligning the key pillars of our strategy” and the VP will agree that “building blocks must be in place.” Meanwhile the associate has to go develop the strategy and is desperately trying to figure out whether the CEO’s “pillars” are the same as the VP’s “building blocks.”

Thinker: So at the end of the day, you have to cut the BS and get to the chase.

Cynic: That’s if you’re at the bottom of the foodchain. Once you’ve gotten your break and moved up, you can BS all you want, and the world will listen rapt, until the next buzzword comes along 15 minutes later.

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By Jia Jia and Joy
Image from Not On the High Street.com