The Language of Evasion: Jargon’s True Purpose Revealed
My left arm, still stiff from sleeping on it wrong, felt like a foreign limb as I adjusted my chair for the morning town hall. A dull throb pulsed from my shoulder to my fingertips, a constant, low-grade annoyance. It was, in many ways, a physical metaphor for the mental contortion that was about to unfold on my screen. The VP, beaming with a practiced enthusiasm that never quite reached his eyes, clicked to the first slide. “We’re leveraging our synergies,” he began, his voice a smooth, confident baritone, “to operationalize a paradigm shift in our go-to-market strategy.” Around my virtual conference room, I imagined a dozen heads nodding in unison, a silent agreement to pretend they understood. I know I saw a few, their faces pixelated but their compliance palpable. Nobody, absolutely nobody, dared to ask what it meant. And that’s precisely the point.
This isn’t just about corporate speak being annoying; it’s about its deliberate, insidious function. Jargon, in its purest form, is a tool. A remarkably effective one, actually. It’s a linguistic smokescreen designed to obscure a lack of coherent strategy, to sidestep making any truly testable commitments, and to manufacture an illusion of consensus where deep, fundamental disagreements simmer just beneath the surface. It allows leaders to speak expansively without ever really saying anything, leaving everyone feeling vaguely informed yet utterly unequipped to act. The energy of an hour-long presentation dissipates into a collective shrug, and another 44
