We all have our language pet peeves. Some bemoan like and other conversational hedges, while others are more put off by icky-sounding words like moist or munch.

But there is one corner of the English language that our culture seems to collectively disdain: workplace jargon. At their best, the trite phrases with which we fill our work speech are vapid and convey a false sense of urgency. At their worst, they are flat-out aggressive.

It’d be easy to dismiss empty language like value-add and deep dive as silly turns-of-phrase, but they’re more detrimental than that. Just as thoughts shape language, the language we use has the power to shape our thoughts and actions. That’s right: Empty speaking not only conveys empty thinking, it can promote it, too. George Orwell puts it best in an essay he wrote for The New Republic in 1946, lamenting the state of the English language:

It is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent, and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse… But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.

Orwell’s essay outlines the issue with clichés, which he calls “dying metaphors.” While recently coined analogies present us with a visual that can further our understanding of a concept, trite phrases are lazy time-savers that pack a statement with letters but not meaning. He cites toe the line and hotbed as examples, and would surely take issue with the latest crop of fluffy speech padding. Streamline. 360-degree thinking. These phrases might’ve elicited a useful visual image at one point, but no longer.

Orwell goes on to condemn “pretentious diction” — words such as utilize and categorical, which are still very present in the workplace today, and which give “an air of impartiality to biased judgements…

Read more | huffingtonpost.com

Photo credit | Workplace by Lay Sedlakova on Flickr