The Linguistic Crimes of Large Organizations
Must it be this way?
Something about working in bureaucracies stupefies people. It doesn’t matter how important the organization is. You could work at NASA – which, among other missions, is trying to figure out where we/everything came from – and you will inevitably be yelled at for not using the requisite number of staples in some anachronistic process of printing, stapling, un-stapling, then faxing a form. Perhaps this tedium explains why people see their basic language skills deteriorate at the office. There’s an awareness that one should appear professional, but not the wherewithal to know how that should be done. Taking anodyne words, pretending they’re suddenly vulgar, then replacing them with incomprehensible but more anodyne terms feels like an easy win. In this way “trash can” becomes “waste receptacle”, “desk” becomes “cubicle” becomes “workstation”, “performance reviews” become “one-on-ones”, “those little bastards calling me ugly in my teaching evaluations” become “students”, and so on.
This tendency takes on different flavors depending on the organization.
Government agencies are deeply and unrequitedly in love with initialisms. You contribute to FERS for your retirement, which is comprised of a pension1 and the TSP. Life insurance is provided by FEGLI; healthcare by FEHB. Pay is determined by the GS, or maybe by the WE or EL if you’re in an agency congress has decided should offer competitive salaries. One doesn’t just fire the guy sleeping under his desk; he’s first put on a PIP. Unless, of course, you want to fire competent people for the theatrics of it; in that case you perform a RIF action. The people making the laws are probably the worst offenders here. Every act needs a too-clever-by-half acronym. New York outdid itself in this regard with the FLACO (“Feathered Lives Also Count”) Act.2
Anything related to transportation is going to be a serial offender. Transit requires you to make periodic announcements to the public, and it’s just an irresistible opportunity for jargon. Airlines decided the perfectly good “disembark” (or “get off”) was passé so now it’s “de-plane”. You know, the same way one “de-velocipedes” when getting off a bicycle. Amtrak, never to be outdone, picked up on this and now we have “de-train”. The MTA, having just introduced subway cars with intelligible pre-recorded announcements, decided to re-record everything using voice actors with New York accents. This was a terrible idea for the same reason that the London Tube announcements don’t sound like Groundskeeper Willie: tourists, people who don’t speak English well, etc. are supposed to be able to understand them. It’s difficult to make out “the elevator is at the rear of the platform” when both “elevator” and “rear” are mispronounced. They also threw in some grammatical errors for funsies: “The MTA police is located at this station.”3 Ferries, oddly enough, usually don’t make announcements in my experience (this is good so, I guess, airlines should be more like boats). Captains of non-ferry boats won’t shut up. They’ll want to say things like “port” and “starboard” but they have to take ten minutes explaining that means “left” and “right” because “we use some special language out here on the bay.”4
Your typical corporation does its damnedest to make mincemeat of standard English. Each one is so focused on efficiency that a localized form of Newspeak is a business necessity. “Let’s discuss the pros and cons” is criminally verbose and must be replaced: “Do a SWOT analysis!” Technology firms are maybe the worst offenders. They seem to despise parts of speech, as in their current campaign to make “compute” a noun. For a while, branding departments thought it would look much cooler if companies were named like ticker symbols, so we took a hacksaw to vowels. I suppose that’s how you get a jeans company named DSTLD. And marketing departments love nothing more than a good pun, as in instructions for installing a bidet end up titled, “Let’s put this sh*t together” [sic]. Sometimes banks aren’t all that bad in this respect. Financial terms are often straightforward, as in “compound interest” is exactly what it sounds like. When it comes to branding though, they’re insufferable. You too could eat cereal at the Platinum Tier Gold Bonus Triple A Executive credit card airport lounge.
HR departments are their own world, more like each other than they are their particular companies. There is always some new personality test vocabulary you’re being asked to “acquaint yourself with before we go over everyone’s results.” I’ve had to take so many HR team-bonding-exercise-mandated personality tests that they all run together (to say nothing of the times in my non-working life when I’ve been told, “I took a personality test for you and I know what’s wrong with you now”). Apparently I’m “conscientious-dominant”, which is an oxymoron. HR trainings are the only place in real life – real life not counting an op-ed about how college students are so much worse than we were when we were overconfident bastards at that age – where I can count on someone using acronyms like “BIPOC” or “AAPI”, instead of, say, “Asian”, in person. They’ll also be sure to go through all eight syllables of LGBTQIA+ instead of just saying “gay” or “queer”. We’re already aware of which sort of queer person we are and don’t need a comprehensive list to see if we qualify, right before the topic turns to W-9s and annual leave policies.5 Moreover, in the first place, I’m not sure if it’s all that polite in conversation to describe someone’s race or sexuality as though it’s an initialism being read from the DSM-5.
Nonprofits are like HR departments without the rest of the company attached. Unless they’re conservative non-profits, in which case their employees must say “liberty” and “free markets” 13 times a minute or they’ll turn to stone (so it’s ironic they’re keen on neither liberty nor free markets).
Unions love a good shibboleth as part of their Gilded Age “the time for the glorious people’s revolution is nigh” cosplay. If they ever sent an email without closing it “in solidarity” it would be a miracle. The term “management” gets bandied about to mean “anyone not lucky enough to be represented”. I was once called “management” while being yelled at by a teamster for daring to move my own chair, never mind that I was 22, one small step removed from intern, and didn’t even have healthcare benefits.
The points so far describe crimes specific to certain categories of organizations. But there are often more similarities than particular quirks when bureaucracies set to bashing normal speech over the head with a shovel before burying it in a cornfield. Some phrasing seems to find a life across a diverse set of institutions. I dare to provide a, by no means comprehensive, list of examples. When on company time, people of all backgrounds incorrectly use…
“performant” for “functioning”; “talent acquisition” for “hiring”; “talent development” for “training”; “level set” for “summarize”; “scrum” for “meeting” (unless I’m mistaken and everyone is just really into rugby); “circle back” and “table that for now” for “drop it”; “unconscious bias” for “bias”; “team members / associates / amazonians” for “employees”; “agent / specialist / representative” for “clerk”; “at the current moment” for “now”; “at the present moment” for “now”; “imagineer” for “engineer who makes rides”; “onboarding” for “training”; “bandwidth” for “time” or “attention”; “toil reduction” for “ease”; “take ownership of” for “take responsibility for”; “operationalize” for “set up”; “productionalize” for “set up”; “knowledge transfer” for “conversation”; “compute” (noun) for “computing power” or “computers”; “learnings” for “lessons”; “action items” for “tasks”; “core competencies” for “skills”; “deck” for “slides”; “deep dive” for “look into”; “whitepaper” for “memo”; “flush out” for “flesh out”;6 “benchmark” (verb) for “test”; “customer service” for “rabbit hole”; “team-building” for “drinks”; “leverage” for “use”; “last and final” for “last” or “final”; “keep me honest” for “double check”; “I appreciate you” for “thanks”; “empathy” for “sympathy”; “empathy” for “manners”; “empathy” for “politeness”; “empathy” for “favor”; “empathy” for “understanding”;7 “lived experience” for “experience”; “generational wealth” for “wealth”; “retirement goals” for “money”; “journey” for “experience”.
This stilted vocabulary sounds close enough to the intended meaning that you’re not totally confused, but you can never get more than a tenuous connection to the topic at hand. You’re lost in the work of a painter with no eye for light. You can make out the object at hand, but no fine details make sense: objects glow despite being in shadow and the sun seems to be in five places at once.8 You can’t help feeling like you should be somewhere else.
Most worrisome, an essay about proper English usage might mean your author is entering his “old man yells at cloud” phase.
The ending here probably owes a bit to Twain.
Unless a ketamine-addled car salesman gets his sights on you, in which case DOGE will come calling.
Despite the stupid name, I’m on board for anything to do with bird safety. Damn the expense! Flaco was a treasure and I got to meet him once… he was asleep in a tree so probably wouldn’t’ve remembered though. It’s embarrassing how long it took me to find a bird that stands nearly three feet tall with a six-foot wingspan.
Yes, that is absolutely a grammatical error. Organizations may be described as singular or plural (e.g., “the committee is” or “the committee are” are both correct). But, “police” refers to multiple police officers; the organization is the “police department”. I am not to be trifled with in the field of obnoxious grammatical pedantry!
Incidentally, it was once “larboard” and “starboard” but after using those terms for a mere 300 years, some Englishman realized that they sound alike and it might be important to be able to tell the difference when they were shouting at each other to keep a rickety, wooden, rat-infested ship from sinking in a storm. Thus “port” was introduced in 1844 as the rare example of a sensible bit of jargon (it was so sensible that port was the side of the ship that faced the dock in port). Being able to tell left from right apparently made the Royal Navy preeminent at the time.
Also, I’d wager that, if villagers ever come for us with pitchforks and torches, they’re not going to say something like, “We want the G’s and the I’s but the rest of you are free to go.”
Flush out implies you’re an English peasant scaring pheasants into the air so an inbred pale person can shoot them.
As with Thomas Kinkade, where you can tell that (usually) he’s painting a cottage in the woods, but you can’t quite figure out why it looks like it might be a hologram, or a nightmare. The physics of it are off.