Corporate newspeak
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought
- George Orwell
One thing that annoyed me anywhere I worked was that people limit themselves to a narrow subset of English. A subset that's full of buzzwords and phrases that sound impressive but lack meaning. It's a subset designed to limit your ability to say anything that could be misinterpreted, and anything that expresses any emotion beyond a notion of happiness or dissatisfaction. This language couldn't mimic George Orwell's Newspeak more even if it tried, and therefore I call it "Corporate newspeak".
What annoys me is that speaking with someone in corporate newspeak feels like we are speaking in memes. We aren't saying what we think, we aren't being honest with one another, instead we are communicating in vague concepts and ideas. We are obscuring our though instead of clarifying them.
Take "We don't have the bandwidth" as an example. What does that sentence mean? It could be "The network switches in our server farm can't handle any more network traffic", or it could be "There isn't anyone available to work on this project in the next month, we would have to pause another project", or "Your project isn't something I think we should invest time in right now". There is no way to know without asking for clarification. But that will probably yield an answer with more newspeak and more buzzwords. Miscommunication is the goal of newspeak. If no one knows exactly what was said then there is a lot of room to avoid any kind of conflict.
Another thing that annoys me with newspeak is that it makes everything sound insincere, hollow, and boring because the vocabulary is made up of cliches. Take "We have an exciting announcement. From next quarter our Widget 3000 will come in two new colors - blue and green" as an example. Is that really an exciting announcement? I mean, it could be. But the excitement is undermined by every other announcement that was made that day that was also "exciting". If everything is exciting then nothing is exciting - it rings hollow.
Some find newspeak to be sincere, but I don't and maybe that's a culture difference. I find only language that I would use every-day sincere. And I don't know a single person that uses newspeak to talk to a friend, or a cashier, or a random person in the street. Maybe that's because of where I grew up? In Croatian the only difference between how you would talk to your friend and a business client is that you'd us the formal "You" instead of the regular "you" and you'd use "Greetings" instead of "Hi" when addressing them.
Communicating in memes slowly becomes thinking in memes. The cliches drown out any authenticity. Thoughts become blurry and hard to explain to others. That's a very high price for conflict avoidance.
What annoys me is that speaking with someone in corporate newspeak feels like we are speaking in memes. We aren't saying what we think, we aren't being honest with one another, instead we are communicating in vague concepts and ideas. We are obscuring our though instead of clarifying them.
Take "We don't have the bandwidth" as an example. What does that sentence mean? It could be "The network switches in our server farm can't handle any more network traffic", or it could be "There isn't anyone available to work on this project in the next month, we would have to pause another project", or "Your project isn't something I think we should invest time in right now". There is no way to know without asking for clarification. But that will probably yield an answer with more newspeak and more buzzwords. Miscommunication is the goal of newspeak. If no one knows exactly what was said then there is a lot of room to avoid any kind of conflict.
Another thing that annoys me with newspeak is that it makes everything sound insincere, hollow, and boring because the vocabulary is made up of cliches. Take "We have an exciting announcement. From next quarter our Widget 3000 will come in two new colors - blue and green" as an example. Is that really an exciting announcement? I mean, it could be. But the excitement is undermined by every other announcement that was made that day that was also "exciting". If everything is exciting then nothing is exciting - it rings hollow.
Some find newspeak to be sincere, but I don't and maybe that's a culture difference. I find only language that I would use every-day sincere. And I don't know a single person that uses newspeak to talk to a friend, or a cashier, or a random person in the street. Maybe that's because of where I grew up? In Croatian the only difference between how you would talk to your friend and a business client is that you'd us the formal "You" instead of the regular "you" and you'd use "Greetings" instead of "Hi" when addressing them.
Communicating in memes slowly becomes thinking in memes. The cliches drown out any authenticity. Thoughts become blurry and hard to explain to others. That's a very high price for conflict avoidance.