Down through the millennia, the debate has raged over whether or not business is, fundamentally, a “good thing.” Philosophical entanglements aside, though, there is one thing about it argued by no one: it is lately in the habit of using some very, very bad words.

The phenomenon of corporate jargon (aka buzzword bingo, aka bullshit) has inspired its fair share of exasperated polemics. Usually, though, these criticisms are delivered not with rage but in a posture of wry, faux-fatalistic amusement. Which is understandable, because let’s face it, jargon is funny. Funny, because what we experience as the humor response is in fact the pleasurable sense of empowerment we feel in recognizing absurdity, thereby reaffirming our mastery of our world and our understanding of the things we know to be true (for the curious, this theory traces back at least as far as the 1923 book The Psychology of Laughter by the polymath and William James protégé Boris Sidis.) And jargon is nothing if not absurd. The problem is, thanks to its inherent comedy, we tend to treat it like a goofball relative whose blunders we willingly forgive because, hey, he’s family and we’re stuck with the knucklehead! This is a mistake. Because jargon is not half as funny, as it is evil.

Evil—but not particularly difficult to account for. The journey to its muddy headwaters is short, and cuts through some of our most basic fears and foibles. For starters, there’s this: lurking behind every stitch of communication, across every industry, is of course the specter of money—more often than not, somebody else’s. It isn’t always explicit, but like dark matter its weighty presence binds to and encompasses everything said and done in the service of Business. Font size on a coupon? Money. The naming of a new toothbrush bristle configuration? Huge money. To prove themselves mindful, sober stewards of that resource, people tend to shy away from simple language. Instead, they will often run in the opposite direction, inflating their discourse like a spooked pufferfish in an attempt to thwart the damning perception that they might somehow be failing to grasp the seriousness of it all. This classic ditch-to-ditch overcorrection has led to countless horrific accidents of language.

A second root cause, native to the workplace and a fertile substrate on which the jargon bacterium flourishes, is competition. Corporations and the individuals that populate them approach each day shovel-in-hand with a goal to dig as deep a moat as possible around their own particular brand of expertise. The hole’s gotta be big, because competition is fierce, so to fill it, they need a whole lot of . . . something. Radical insight and incontrovertible genius are scarce. Syllables are not. And although more of them rarely correlates to a higher level of understanding or more incisive point of view, like the tiny arcs of what might be a sea serpent breaking the water at a hundred yards in a blurred photograph, their murky multiplicity offers tantalizing proof to the uncritical mind that something substantial, slightly mysterious, and potentially very impressive is lurking just below the surface.

As a general rule, the more subjective the industry, the worse things tend to get. If the science is soft, and the result metrics and attributions are tough to pin down, look out. The inverse is often true as well. This is why fields like medicine and engineering, while steeped in technical language, tend to play with smaller cards of full-on buzzword bingo than, say, marketing, which is famous for spinning out bizarre neologisms and grotesque portmanteaus with the fury of a Chinese fireworks wheel. It’s not much of a stretch to suggest that the high frequency of cryptic jibber-jabber in the “squishier” fields is at least in part a defensive response to their own idiosyncratic underpinnings: yeah, well, if this isn’t real science, then how come it’s so hard to understand?

In its wildly popular role as a blame sponge, jargon commands a devout following. The more long-winded the justification one can crouch behind as evidence of a thorough decision-making process, the greater the distance one can put, so the logic seems, between oneself and the reaper’s blade, should things turn ugly. Or maybe the hope is simply that the reaper will become disoriented in the fog of words and stumble away, in search of souls who so naively stated their point of view in more accessible language. Somewhere in the second half of Anna Karenina is buried the disheartening observational gem which reads, roughly, “It can be difficult to cut through a pillow with a sword.”
Moving from a few basic reasons why it is, to why it is so incredibly insidious, we begin with the simple issue of clarity as a prerequisite for achievement. Not all work is exaggerated pantomime for the observation of management; more often than not, people are honestly trying to get stuff done. In a cruel twist, it is during these earnest moments that the jargon comfort blanket smothers, where once it soothed. That’s because nobody can do good work with bad information, and anyone attempting to model useful things from a shapeless glob of jargon is basically working off of a finger painting, of an Etch-A-Sketch, of a whale tooth scrimshaw, of an interpretive dance performance, of a Bazooka Joe comic, of a shadow on the wall of Plato’s cave. With every substitution of maddening mumbo-jumbo for the familiar, given names of things, the further the conversation is pushed from the fundamental ideas those names represent. At a distance, the signal-to-noise ratio explodes. The simple turns complicated, and the certain, suddenly unsure. There is no more telltale sign of a room mentally asphyxiating in a jargonian miasma than the lengthy, complex discussion followed by a plea for basic understanding: “So, good points all around. Just to clarify, though, guys—we love this idea? Or we hate it?”

As clarity fades, morale is sure to follow. With the link between productivity and happiness well-documented, this correlation should be troubling for the efficiency-minded manager. Besides the obvious operational problems that crop up when nobody knows what anyone is talking about, there is an added layer of gunk that accretes as the burden of laboring in such an environment takes its toll. When every conversation is a water aerobics routine, it’s only so long until even the strongest shoulders begin to sag.

Jargon’s drag on morale extends yet further, in a more subtle direction. Besides the practical concerns already noted, there’s something about it that just isn’t quite right—simply put, jargon is...creepy. Because it’s not quite real words, it has the quality of making those who use a lot of it seem like, well, not quite real people either. Watching someone in the middle of a buzzword-laced spiel, comparisons to the Manchurian Candidate loom large: the glazed over eyes, the impassive face—it is the mask of the human mind driving with its knees. At this very moment, in meetings across the globe, countless such performances are being staged before audiences that are no doubt nodding with grave appreciation, while reflecting sadly to themselves, “I knew this person, once.”

None of this figures very positively in the equation of trying to keep or retain top talent. Sharp minds often have a low threshold for jargon’s excruciating brand of imprecision, and will either flee or dull quickly under the relentless verbal bludgeoning. This is bad. Maybe worse, though, is the flip side of the equation: its vagueness provides a haven for mediocre thought, and by extension, the mediocre minds that produce it. For management, this can make the task of identifying high performers, and low ones, a total nightmare. The more canned phrases that infiltrate the office lexicon, the more similar the conversations, idiotic, brilliant or otherwise, begin to sound. Infused with enough jargon, the bad idea and the good one can appear almost identical. For the impostor, this is fantastic news, as the odds of being found out are instantly reduced by about half. For the dream of anything approaching a meritocracy, though, it’s game over. When buzzwords take over, the dilutive effect to the ideals of individual excellence and idea authorship is profound. Sameness becomes not just a byproduct of the system, but a shared goal. As the quality of an organization’s product declines, the greater the degree of compromise a person has to internalize to remain associated with it, and subsequently, the greater the need to feel they are not going through it alone. Here, jargon serves as both a communal analgesic, and a proxy for real achievement. In this environment, to cite Keynes’s famous lament, it really is better to fail conventionally, than to succeed unconventionally—and suddenly, the dark side of jargon comes into clearer relief.

So, yes—it’s bad. And unfortunately, the trend for now appears firmly towards the right, and up. For answers why, we can look to two macro trends as likely culprits. One is the current dismal state of the job market, and the resulting tension it visits on the workplace. When work is tough to come by, it leads to behavior that creates conditions ideal for the production of surplus quantities of jargon. A heightened state of anxiety = a tendency towards more worse words, more often, for reasons already cited. The other is the cult of newness ushered in by the rapid advance of technology. There is a growing faction that seems motivated by an intense fear of any association with even the Very Recent Past, who view the use of classic, unaffected diction as a half-step clear of The Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. Innovation is great. Less great, though, is this frantic scramble to showcase familiarity with, and mastery of, our shifting landscape by communicating in language that has the sheen of newness, but without luster of actual utility. As a sad corollary to Moore’s Law, the amount of crypto-babble packed on the average PowerPoint slide is doubling every couple of years, with no foreseeable end in sight.

In the face of all this, things might look pretty grim. Maybe they are. But for those still willing to expose their thoughts and opinions to the hard light of coherence, there is reason to fight the good fight. Theirs will always be the domain of real accomplishment. While the mealymouthed might succeed in padding the odds against failure, they can never know the thrill of unqualified victory—after all, there is only so much one can feel through a cocoon of bubble wrap. Then, too, there is the simple pleasure of knowing where one stands, of telling it like it is, and the relief that comes with just letting it all hang out. There’s no question that the energy required to maintain the apparatus of verbal low cunning is substantial, or that the wear and tear on the ego, however deeply buried, is severe. In the long run, the value of the trade-off is dubious at best. And who knows? It could be that all of this is only a passing phase, subject to expansion and eventual contraction like any other. If that turns out to be the case, those who stay the course of clarity will not only save themselves much wasted effort and embarrassment, but will enjoy the privilege of watching from afar as the baloney bubble collapses in on itself. The satisfaction promises to be highly leverageable.