Jargonuts

“The medium is the message” is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.

The phrase was introduced in his most widely known book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964. McLuhan proposes that a medium itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study. He said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself.

— Wikipedia

I have been impressed (or depressed) over recent years as a new form of the truth of these statements has become more and more prevalent.  I’m not talking about the internet as a new form of medium, but about the use of language, or more correctly, jargon to portray meaning.  While far from complete, theOfficeLife.com has a dictionary of business jargon that ranges from funny, to understandable, to simply ludicrous.  If you run into a specific term not found there, try unsuck-it.com.  The problem is often that there are common ways to say exactly the same thing that are clearly understood.  And if saying them in normal, understandable words seems stupid and meaningless, then you should question how saying it in such a ridiculous way makes it any more intelligent.  But instead these arcane terms are thrown around like beach balls at a rock concert.  Why?  I’m not entirely sure.  Maybe they were created to impress someone.  Or someone who did not have a good grasp of the English language just made things up when they couldn’t come up with a more direct way to say something.


I note that certain terms are described as “designed to avoid committing” in a more formal sense.  “Addressing” an issue may placate someone into thinking that things will be fixed.  But there is no real commitment to do, tackle, or complete anything.  Just address it.  It has been talked about.  It has been located.  But nothing is done about it.  That was not promised.

“Business jargon is, if nothing else, pretentious” as one person commented on a particular site.  My thoughts, exactly.  Everyone wants “proactive,” but if you do something not asked for, don’t expect to get paid or even a pat on the back.

Add to this the constant desire to turn everything into an acronym and entire discussions or presentations can become entirely nonsensical.

Too often we receive emails from management encouraging us to do high-sounding but otherwise unintelligible things.  I spent a little time playing with a web site that generates ridiculous mission statements.  After seeing a few of the parodies,  I read an article linked to it that included some real mission statements.  Here’s one for the books: “Company X produces vendor-neutral solutions to enterprise-wide integration for mission critical applications.”  What do they do?  Should I have any reason to hire them?  I really can’t tell.

But the Jargonuts are everywhere among us.  In a recent column in the Washington Post, Gene Weingarten laments what he refers to as death of the English language on August 21, 2010 as the result of “an illiterate proofreading of an illiterate criticism of an illiteracy. Moments later, already severely weakened, English died of shame.”  He goes on to blame the weakened state of the language heavily on the introduction of a particular phrase to everyday use.

Observers say, however, that no development contributed more dramatically to the death of the language than the sudden and startling ubiquity of the vomitous verbal construction "reach out to" as a synonym for "call on the phone," or "attempt to contact." A jargony phrase bloated with bogus compassion — once the province only of 12-step programs and sensitivity training seminars — "reach out to" is now commonplace in newspapers. In the last half-year, the New York Times alone has used it more than 20 times in a number of contextually indefensible ways, including to report that the Blagojevich jury had asked the judge a question.

It is no longer important to say what you mean, rather it is important to sound sincere, or at least sound good.  It is more important to impress with high-sounding words than it is to state in a clear manner.  “Leverage” is no longer about making my work more efficient and effective, but getting the job done more cheaply by giving it to someone else.  The result may or may not be more efficient in terms of dollars.  It will take more time for a less experienced, lower-paid person to do the research necessary to write a technical memo or create a spreadsheet that accurately depicts the combined effects of specific facts applied to both existing and proposed tax laws.  That is not truly more efficient although it is often necessary if they are to become more efficient themselves.

There is much talk about perceptions, but little about reality.  In fact, too often we fall for the hollow “perception is reality.”  We may be judged based on perception.  But if the perception is not in sync with reality, then the judgment is not actually on reality, but on our inability to clearly demonstrate it as real.

Most of this is like the “your results are guaranteed or your money back” I heard on that radio advertisement I wrote about several years ago.  Buried in the words that make you feel certain that you have spent your money well on product X or consultant Y should be the nagging suspicion that they actually said something different from what you thought they said.  We may think that we are getting a WYSIWYG result, but since we have not actually seen anything, it is more like WYGIWYG (what you get is what you get).