Why everyone hates the way Silicon Valley talks

“off-putting, nonsensical, and completely ridiculous”

“particularly pervasive and annoying”

“reaches a whole new level of douchery”

What noxious thing are these journalists describing? No, it’s not one of the current candidates for President. It’s the language that people in Silicon Valley use. Basically, the way that people here talk is immensely irritating to everyone else.

When my husband and I started working on a guidebook to Silicon Valley jargon last year, we did so because we knew it was confusing to outsiders, as well as entertaining if you look at it the right way. But we were surprised to discover how vehemently many people outside the Valley hate the vocabulary that has been spawned here. They complain about how it “seeps into” and “infiltrates” other fields from fashion to foreign aid, how it’s “obnoxious and overused.”

Why such hatred for a few turns of phrase? Shouldn’t people in other places be happy that in addition to bringing them lots of cool new tech and business models, we’re also supplying the words to go with them?

The resentment toward Silicon Valley jargon is part and parcel of the overall animosity towards the region that is more pervasive than people here realize. I admit, when I was living in Chicago during the last boom time at the turn of the century, every time I picked up a copy of Fast Company magazine and saw the coverage of Silicon Valley life I felt annoyed and thought “what makes those Bay Area people think they are so great anyhow?” I found the whole vibe completely insufferable. My feelings were a mixture of jealousy, feeling left out, and feeling frustrated that I just couldn’t get what the fuss was all about (other than all the money that was being made). This time around, with the Silicon Valley economy booming again and doing better than many other regions of the country, there are a lot of people around the country who feel similarly. These are the same people who are showing a lot of schadenfreude over the startup economy’s recent stumbles, and gleefully retweet pictures of bleeding unicorns. There’s a lot more of these people than those in Silicon Valley realize.

Now that Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are becoming the key media that create and disseminate information in our society, Silicon Valley has become a cultural center of gravity that is starting to usurp the traditional dominance of New York and Los Angeles. While it has provided numerous benefits, not everyone is pleased.

Some are annoyed by the inherent optimism in the way Silicon Valley speaks, especially given the perception that most of its good fortune seems to remain there. Sure, it’s ok for people here to “fail fast” and “fail forward” because there’s always someone to catch them and even reward them. Silicon Valley can feel free to “disrupt” existing industries and ignore the laws built up around them, because it doesn’t suffer the consequences as directly. In the eyes of the rest of the world, Silicon Valley likes to act like it’s exempt from the rules that people in other places tend to face. They are thinking “What makes Silicon Valley so special, anyway?”

Also unpopular are Silicon Valley’s “tech bros,” who are viewed both inside and outside the Valley (but even more outside) as obnoxious, and the language they use gets tainted as a result.

A lot of people also find Silicon Valley speak off-putting because it’s like a secret code that only the elite few can understand, and they aren’t among them. Columnist Vivek Wadhwa describes a typical reaction to this impenetrable language by saying “[the] way Silicon Valley works is that when people begin to understand a jargon, they change it. Create new words only few understand!” Personally I disagree and don’t think that people in Silicon Valley purposefully try to be exclusionary in their language use, but that certainly is the way it comes across to many.

The popularity of HBO’s Silicon Valley had a lot to do with fostering such sentiments, as many TV viewers outside of Silicon Valley found themselves having difficulty understanding what the characters were saying. Suddenly Silicon Valley’s clubby way of speaking was in everyone’s face.

There are innocuous explanations for many aspects of Silicon Valley jargon. For example, the area is full of tech people, who often use the technical terms they are familiar with in other contexts. A great example is “ping”, a computer network administration software utility used to test the reachability of a host on an IP network and to measure the response time. In Silicon Valley to “ping” someone now also means to contact them, usually via email — a usage that doesn’t seem to have spread yet to other areas. “Cycles” and “bandwidth” are similar examples.

But more importantly, Silicon Valley has become the place where many technical and business trends start, and new words are needed to describe new things. If others want to take part in them, they will need that language, and if they don’t (or feel like they haven’t been invited to) they will be repelled by it.

Since Silicon Valley is disrupting the world, it’s no surprise that our way of speaking is disrupting the language too. We just shouldn’t be surprised when everyone else isn’t delighted about “breaking shit” and “monetizing.” We should do our part to include others in the successes that we create here, and that begins helping others to understand and appreciate our language, while also being careful not to foist it onto everyone.