J. Davidson - Planet Word

He included a list of ‘overworked’ words, which he described as ‘good and useful … when properly used; my worry is only against the temptation to prefer them over other words which would convey better the meaning you want to express’.

More than half a century later, most of the words contained in the list remain firmly entrenched in government-speak: utilize, envisage, implement, viable, visualize, rendition … But these overworked words are nothing compared to a deluge of non-words which has gripped the English language. This jargon, according to the American poet David Lehman, ‘is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable; it gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to ideas that, if stated directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false’. It’s called, variously, corporate-speak or bureaucratese or offlish (for office English), and its terminology of blue-sky thinking and benchmarking and thinking outside the box and synergizing and conditionality has spread throughout the world of corporations and government departments and offices. Our language thrives on innovation, but the baffling phrases, power words, tortured verbs and pointless adages of corporate jargon have little to recommend them. This jargon appears to be neither inclusive nor humorous nor very clever.

A wadge of gung-ho transitive verbs are favoured: to action, to incentivize, to leverage, to strategize, to downsize . Everything is upbeat. Problems aren’t problems, they’re challenges ; commitment is 110 per cent ; anything done in the future is on a go-forward basis . Other monstrosities include I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with the situation rather than ‘I don’t have the time’; end-user perspective instead of ‘what the customer thinks’; cascade down information for simply sending a memo.

A new office pastime has been created. Employees play Buzzword — or Bullshit — Bingo in the boardroom, ticking off a predetermined list of jargon words uttered during the meeting. The first person to have a full card is supposed to yell ‘Bingo!’

Corporate-speak is inveigling itself into every corner of officialdom. The jobs section in a British newspaper had the following advert: ‘Proactive, self-starting facilitator required to empower cohorts of students and enable them to access the curriculum.’ That’s a teacher, to you and me.

There’s no British institution that has ridiculed pretentious or obfuscatory language more than Private Eye , the satirical magazine. The magazine’s editor, Ian Hislop, has tracked and excoriated the rise and rise of business and political jargon since he took the job in 1986.

Using language as a way of obscuring the truth rather than revealing the truth is always dangerous, and so I think that’s part of the point of attempting always to monitor these excesses. And English is a very precise language. It can be used to convey anything beautifully but it’s also very amenable to nonsense … The British are obsessed with their own language, and Private Eye gives them a way of monitoring it. So a lot of these columns were actually started by readers just saying, ‘Have you noticed that everybody is using the word “solutions”?’ You can’t get your windows replaced now, someone does ‘window solutions’. You can’t get a garden hose, you have ‘water irrigation domestic solutions’.

Hislop has a theory on how management-speak has spread like a virus through institutions like the BBC, the NHS, the civil service and local government.

It starts in management consultancies, which are firms designed to make a science out of what used to be an art or common sense — management, dealing with people. Management consultants make this into a science. You hire management consultants usually for two reasons. One is you want to sack people and you don’t do it yourself or, two, you want to create verbiage to describe non-existent jobs. So you’re either getting rid of people who do a real job or you’re inventing non-jobs. And the jargon does perfectly for both of those. So the people in non-jobs can send each other memos about rolling out milestones and delivery and competence, and the people who are being sacked are told that they’ve been restructured.

The language of management seems to have deteriorated at such a breakneck speed in terms of its warmth and emotional directness that it’s hard to imagine it getting any more impersonal. Ian Hislop says companies are aware of the problems.

What amuses me is the same management who basically are bringing in systems to make sure people fall apart then are told there’s no bonding going on. So they have to organize paintballing weekends and start bringing in members of the SAS to give talks about getting across bridges without using rope and forcing people to socialize because they’ve become so disparate inside the office.

In the brave new world of management speak, harsh realities get hidden. This is the language of doublespeak, deliberately euphemistic, ambiguous or obscure. In some cases it actually reverses the meanings of words. ‘Doublespeak’ is a term which can be traced back to George Orwell, who invented the words doublethink and newspeak for his novel 1984 .

American linguist William Lutz writes:

Doublespeak is language which pretends to communicate but doesn’t. It is language which makes the bad seem good, the negative seem positive, the unpleasant seem unattractive, or at least tolerable. It is language which avoids, shifts or denies responsibility; language which is at variance with its real or purported meaning. It is language which conceals or prevents thought.

The uglier side of doublespeak is its use as camouflage to hide the reality. In the world of business, euphemisms are bald: workers aren’t sacked, they’re down - or right-sized, derecruited or involuntarily terminated . Companies don’t suffer losses, they have negative cash flows or downward adjustments or negative growths .

Most disturbing of all is how the doublespeak of business and management has been adopted by governments and politicians who use deliberately ambiguous phrases to make us feel better about politically sensitive subjects like war or killings or torture. To kill becomes to take down, take out or neutralize , or the ‘unlawful and arbitrary deprivation of life’ (US State Department annual report 1984). Civilian casualties are collateral damage ; an escalation in fighting is a surge ; state kidnapping for the purposes of torture becomes rendition ; a terrorist furthering state interests is a freedom fighter ; genocide is changed to ethnic cleansing . Weapons are assets ; nuclear weapons are nuclear deterrents . Torture is enhanced coercion interrogation technique .

Political doublespeak isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s most infamous use is the terminology of the Nazis to describe the systematic extermination of Jews — the Final Solution . Hitler used euphemisms to dehumanize and make the unacceptable acceptable. He spoke about the need to purify and cleanse , to rid the Reich of the Jewish vermin and to decontaminate or disinfect the Reich of the Jewish bacillus . Instead of kill or murder, expressions like special treatment, evacuation, resettlement or conveyed to special measure were used. The planned killing of handicapped people was euthanasia or mercy death . Poland, with its death camps, was called the Jewish resettlement region ; gas chambers were bathhouses , and mobile gas chambers were auxiliary equipment or delousing vans .