What was your key takeaway last week? Did you whiteboard matters with those around you in order to move the needle by EOD (end of day), or did you align offline? I am not talking about making the important choice between pizza or a curry; rather, this is the sort of vocabulary you might hear during a long Zoom meeting. The kind where nothing much is decided until the final five minutes, when everyone has what the Victorians called a ‘fit of the clevers’ in order to come up with something constructive before the screen dies.
After a recent survey revealed the corporate phrases we want to banish for ever, it is worth taking a look at the language we love to hate. Or, as some might say, to double-click on the subject of jargon and take a deep dive into its use.
The Origins of Jargon
Let us start with the word ‘jargon’ itself, which came over with the Normans as ‘jargoun’, meaning the twittering of birds. It did not take a huge leap before the word embraced inarticulate chatter and landed on total gibberish. Which is where many of us would leave it, judging by the survey that tells us such phrases as TLDR (‘Too Long, Didn’t Read’) and ‘synergy’ leave us cold or, at worst, totally bamboozled.
It is worth remembering that we all speak jargon, often several kinds. Whether we are a runner, cyclist, cabbie, doctor or knitter (let us not even mention teenager), we are so busy exchanging shorthand with our own group that we fail to notice the hundreds of other secret languages being swapped around us.
The Purpose of Jargon
After all, birds understand each other perfectly – it is the rest of us who do not have a clue. And that is the purpose of jargon: it is a code that unites the members of a club and is explicitly designed to keep outsiders out. When a paramedic radios to say that they are ‘blueing’ a patient to hospital with ‘GCS9 and probable ETOH’, for example, they are using a protocol that is swift, succinct and painless. For them at least, since the patient in question is being rushed to A&E with blue lights flashing and a score of 9 out of 15 on the GCS (Glasgow Coma Scale) having imbibed too much ETOH, or ethanol/alcohol.
The same goes for the coded banter of builders. A ‘snotter’ is anything stuck to paint or plaster that should not be, while ‘spreading the fat on the Lionel’ is code for plastering the ceiling (a nod to Lionel Richie’s Dancing On The Ceiling). Should you hear your decorator ask their mate to ‘pass me the Gary’, you will probably see them being handed a spirit level (or, in rhyming slang, a ‘Gary Neville’).
Jargon in Business and Politics
Jargon can offer unexpected stories, too. In business, there is such a thing as the ‘cobra effect’, apparently named after an attempt by colonial administrators in Delhi to reduce the number of cobras in the city by offering a bounty per dead snake. Enterprising locals promptly started breeding cobras in order to cash in. When the scheme was cancelled, the breeders released their now-worthless snakes, making the problem considerably worse than before. The cobra effect is consequently any well-meaning intervention that incentivises the very behaviour it was designed to prevent. Or, as the Germans say, a Verschlimmbesserung: an attempted improvement that makes things worse.
Such creativity is largely absent from much of the jargon circulating in our offices. Take the concept of ‘sunsetting’ or taking ‘a haircut’ – two euphemisms from corporate-speak for, respectively, ditching a project that seemed like a good idea at the time, and accepting a loss without getting wiped out. Phrases such as these now belong firmly to the realm of annoying pretension. Like decorative cushions, they are harmless but end up getting in the way.
Politicians, as we have recently witnessed, can make jargon into something of a dark art. Once again, some of it is simply for show. Rachel Reeves’ ‘securonomics’ was a clunky but pithy coinage for national economic security, while ‘polycrisis’, popular with think-tanks, essentially means multiple crises happening simultaneously. ‘Lots of things going wrong at once’ probably did not need a Greek prefix.
In other situations, formulaic phrases come in handy when a speaker needs to stick to the script. When Catherine ‘Cat’ Little, the top civil servant at the Cabinet Office, was asked by the foreign affairs committee last month to comment on claims that No 10 had pressurised the Foreign Office to complete the vetting of Peter Mandelson, she replied: ‘I’ve not seen any documentation that would formally confirm that level of pressure’ – a sentence that tells a hundred stories and none at the same time. In the dialect of senior civil servants, ‘I did not have sight of the paperwork’, is not so much a confession of ignorance as an elegant emergency exit.
Business executives have other escape routes. Recently, McDonald’s UK and Ireland chief executive Lauren Schultz told the BBC that she did not ‘want to talk about the past’ when asked about sexual misconduct allegations against the firm. She added that what had happened in recent years was ‘unacceptable’, but ‘we have drawn a line under it’, employing one of the most reliably infuriating phrases in the corporate lexicon.
The Design Flaw of Jargon
Yet it would be too easy to conclude that political and corporate jargon is simply insincerity wearing a lanyard. In any specialist group, language does genuine work. When economists discuss ‘fiscal headroom’ or ‘structural deficits’ they are not being deliberately obscure, they are reaching for shared coordinates that allow members of a professional tribe to be specific and quick. The trouble is, the same quality that makes jargon handy for insiders makes it impenetrable to everyone else.
And in a democracy, where the whole point is that we all understand what our bosses are doing, this is a significant design flaw. Which means that the key takeaway from all of this might actually be something we have known all along. Jargon, at the EOD, is strictly for the birds.
