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The Pain Points of Business Jargon
Professor and Author Anne Curzan explains the benefits and drawbacks of workplace jargon and offers a new way to think about our language peeves.
Each year brings new lists of the most annoying business jargon or “buzzwords ”— words that simply must go. The ubiquitous AI and circle back topped one list for 2024, and act your wage another. Last year, choiceful received attention as CEOs‘ new favorite word near the end of 2023; choiceful has the versatility of meaning, affording lots of choices and being selective about one’s choices. Many of us outside and inside the business world have met these words with a collective groan. But how well justified is our complaint?
Business jargon is an easy target. Lists proliferate online to educate and lament terms such as leveraging, the bleeding edge, pain point, synergy, disrupting, thinking outside the box, and pushing the envelope. I know, you’re groaning again. Jargon resides in all kinds of professions — medical and academic jargon come to mind, as well as carpentry and journalism, to name a few — and many of our pastimes too, from sports to knitting to wine tasting. That said, the premium that the business world puts on the innovative and shiny, as well as the large role (some might say outsized) that business plays in our everyday lives, mean that many of us can’t help but notice new business jargon.
And by notice, I mean feel cranky about. Even though I’m trained as a linguist who studies language change for a living, I am not immune to this response. I have long disliked impactful. It is perfectly well-formed, but I find it aesthetically displeasing and its surge in use is new within my lifetime. I also know I will eventually get over it because impactful is (I hate to admit it) a useful word. Then, a couple of years ago, as I listened to presentations by my business school colleagues here at the University of Michigan, I felt inundated by double click as the new way to refer to diving deeper into a topic. It was the verbal transition between the bullet points on one slide and the discussion of one of those points on the next slide. It’s the new drill down.
I have no grounds for being cranky about double click, as my partner pointed out to me over dinner. It is actually a clever metaphor (at least for those of us who remember this setting for how to open icons in Windows), and I was responding both to its newness to my ear and its insidery use within the business school context.
Insider/outsider boundaries is one of the effects of jargon, both for good and ill. Within a field, jargon can help provide important technical specificity in some cases and a useful shorthand in others. It can also establish who is “in the know” and part of the field — and who is not. We come together around our professions and pastimes, and knowing the lingo can contribute to a sense of belonging. But it’s important for all of us to be aware how jargon can be a barrier to broader communication. First, jargon stops feeling like jargon if you spend a lot of time with it! And we can forget how opaque it is to those outside the circle. Second, sometimes even those on the inside can feel excluded and confused if they are, for example, from a different culture (e.g., American baseball metaphors like touch base and home run aren’t always transparent to speakers of other world varieties of English). And third, especially non-technical jargon can jump the shark (so to speak!). With big upswings in popularity, jargon, like any other fashion trend, risks overuse: it becomes trite at best and annoying — sometimes even to the point of distracting an audience — at worst.
Jargon can also obscure in ways that feel euphemistic at best and harmful at worst, and this has been one of the critiques of some business jargon. Restructuring and rightsizing, and now in some cases transforming, involve real people losing their jobs, for example.
So how should we feel about a new business jargon contender like choiceful? Well, for starters, it turns out it’s not new. This often happens: When we first notice a word, we assume it must be new as opposed to newly noticed. Choiceful is recorded back to the 16th century, and while relatively rare over much of its existence, we’re now noticing the word because it is suddenly business fashionable. Thinking outside the box goes back to the early 1970s, and pushing the envelope is almost as old.
If the past is any indication of the future, choiceful has three possible fates. First, it may be a blip on the jargon radar and then fade back into rare usage. Or it may stick around and stop feeling jargony. In the 1960s, critics went after finalize as unacceptable jargon, and now it seems completely standard to most of us. The historically jargony words incentivize and impactful are making their way into standard usage too, along with growing a business (as opposed to growing things like plants, which no one is opposed to anymore).
Or finally, it may stick around and keep that jargony feel, as has thinking outside the box, which goes back to the early 1970s and skyrocketed in popularity by the 1980s. It is still on an upward trajectory.
When we encounter new jargon like progressing projects and architecting, I encourage us all to do with words what we often do with birds. When birders see new or unusual birds, they don’t try to get rid of them! Instead, they are curious about them, observe their behavior, and learn more about them. We can do that with business buzzwords too, making us savvier language producers and consumers.
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