Fed up with synergising? Not keen to cascade it out to your team or circle back any time soon? Of all the creative interpretations of the English language, office jargon is among the most derided communication. As such, Steven Poole’s gently savage overview of the “spirit sapping indignities” of transitioning, diarizing and a myriad other business-speak phrases is by turns funny and fascinating – a thesaurus of the absurd to the incomprehensible, that punctuates many conversations in the average working day.
“Office speak,” Poole says darkly, “is a maddeningly viral kind of Unspeak engineered to deflect blame, complicate simple ideas, obscure problems and perpetuate power relations.” And his target is jargon’s continuing and bewildering (to him) ubiquity. As he says, surveys over the past decade have shown that managers and workers alike claim to hate it…but no one is willing to give it up. Indeed, he notes that even when a word wins a dubious accolade such as the top spot in Forbes magazine’s ‘Jargon Madness Tournament’ it continues to be used widely. “When I first wrote about this abusive argot in 2013, my article became the most viewed article on The Guardian network, and within hours there were thousands of comments from frustrated office workers offering examples of their own verbal pet hates,” he continues.
His preface considers the emotional imperatives of these types of phrases and the active emptiness of not really saying what’s on your mind, but dancing round it in rings of ever-decreasing verbal strangulation. But it is the lexicon – and Poole’s witheringly funny yet surprisingly informative prose on each entry – that makes the book fascinating. Do you miss the days when people talked about things rather than ‘around’ things, took a risk rather than pushed an envelope or merely looked at something without considering ‘how the optics will resonate’? Do you long for the days before nouns become verbs and you didn’t have to productise, try solutioning or sunset a project. If so, then Poole’s eye-rolling prose will soothe your linguistic soul.
Poole also looks at the origins of contemporary management mutterings (a surprising amount coming from military beginnings…) and revealing that far from being a new phenomenon, some phrases have surprisingly historic roots, Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, was described as a ‘thought leader’ as far back as 1872, benchmarking comes from a 19th century surveying term while the idea of ‘close of play’ has it’s roots in the genteel environment of early 20th century British civil service. As he does so, he lifts the lid on a world where words and phrases have been co-opted and repurposed for a group speak that few dare to deviate from – where people go on annual leave, rather than on holiday, where everyone is a stakeholder and “colleagues and superiors no longer want to ‘talk to’ or ‘phone’ or ‘contact’ you; they want to touch base”.
Going forward then, what’s the takeaway from this? What are the learnings? Well you could always run this book up the nearest flagpole and see who salutes it? Failing that it could just be the best Secret Santa present ever bought for a verbally beleaguered member of your team…
Key takeaways
Thought leader: “A thought leader is someone who deposits a steaming package of pure thought in his wake and then runs away to a safe distance before it explodes, utterly destroying everything within an impressive blast radius.”
Transitioning: “If you are not being forcibly transitioned, you might decide to use the term yourself for a career move (‘I’ve transitioned to a new job’) just because it sounds so smooth and elegant, as though one were a masterful gliding robot, or a teleporting space adventurer.”
Deliverables: “To say that you are delivering (e.g. ‘results’) sounds nice and dynamic, as well as concretely physical, as though space were being traversed in order to give someone an important package.”
Leverage: “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world, said Archimedes. He didn’t say he would leverage the deliverables matrix.”
Who Touched Base in my Thought Shower?: A Treasury of Unbearable Office Jargon by Steven Poole (Hodder & Stoughton)
