Why Do Corporations Speak the Way They Do?

Corporate speak may not mean anything of value to anyone in a meeting, but like the Emperor's New Clothes, no one wants to point out the inefficiency and mind-numbing nature of the constant use of the jargon. Everyone pretends that they are on the same page as everyone else.

Concealment of facts, covering of real emotions and stating the unspeakable may be the unspoken purpose of the buzzword filled, corporate language, which takes different metaphors in different decades, like aviation (30,000-foot level outlook), big tech (bandwidth), wall street (stakeholders) and the industrial age (production capacity).

As the corporates evolve, corporate-speak takes newer forms, mixing and matching of verbs and nouns, creating new acronyms and even new words (complexify, replatform, directionality)

All these buzzwords and references sometimes compete with and negate each other, rendering them useless, inefficient or even harmful.

The underlying reasons for the use of this kind of language by employees can be:

• Hidden anxiety about our relationship to work.
• Concealing the trivial nature of our work.
• Being internally ashamed of the kind of work being done.
• Being constantly worried about the fragile nature of one’s employment.
• Pretending that our jobs are more interesting and ‘large’ than they seem.

.. they can get inside our heads and can contaminate our thoughts in an instant. Jargon language that uses metaphors, references, metonyms and anthropomorphisms acts as a weapon against people in the office by lowering their positions and making them part of the general insanity.

The encouragement __of such language at the workplace serves as a reminder that delusion and cloaking of facts are considered an asset.