Corporate speak and the English language

Corporate speak and the English language 

It is the 75th Anniversary of Orwell's seminal essay - Politics and English language. Seventy-five years later, the lament on the state of the English language persists. Calendars changed, medium socialized, the venerable pen discarded, keystrokes introduced but the dilapidated state of the language remains.    

In the corporate world, the English language is in a bad way! Dying metaphors, verbal false limbs, pretentious diction, meaningless jargons infest all kinds of writing boards. My inspiration to make this argument came from the below verbal obfuscation.   

"We need to mirror with our employees with personalization. In the current VUCA scenario, generalization may not resonate with our teams. Trust, Respect and Personalization are the key. You never know how these curated conversations may positively "touch" our employees' mindsets and emotions."

 

The author is perhaps suggesting that we need to show empathy to our employees and have individual conversations. But the above paragraph is rich in verbal grease, tin-eared jargons, and pretentious diction. It is in vogue to curate your sentences with 'curated.' The author prostates at the high religion of jargons. Amen!

"Comparing the present clock-reported time with what we previously discussed and made an agreement about, it seems that I may not be exactly on schedule."

The author is definitely suggesting is that he is 'damned late' for the meeting. This sentence generates more fog than light. Perhaps that was the intention!

"If I can be of any further assistance and you seek any clarification or queries, please do not hesitate to contact me."

We all know the meaning of this blighted sentence. It is pointlessly appended as the last line in every email, like a tail to a lizard.  

"Have you touched base with him?"

A curious case of a worn-out metaphor. I am sure the author didn't intend to touch one's base during this contactless era. The phrase was originally used to conjure an image of baseball where both runners and fielders have to "touch base." Worn out it is. Avoid such cliches like the plague. Yes, you read it right! I used a cliche to warn you of cliches. 

"Please revert to my mail."

A classic Indian problem. Revert means putting something back to its original state. I wish emails could go back to their original purpose of articulating new ideas!

"A de-growth of 35%!" 

 I can never come to terms with the desecration of the sacred word growth. We don't de-grow; we shrink. We don't de-profit; we have losses. We don't unlive; we die!!

Finally, if the author wants to acknowledge unfortunate deeds, one will revert to a passive sentence when an active sentence should do. 

"Mistakes were made," "Process was not adhered to" "Budgets were missed" 

The idea (unknown to our minds) is to gloss over the "I" and "we" in the sentence. Mistakes don't make in themselves. Budgets don't go wandering by themselves. The delicious irony is when we hit the goals.     

Then passive sentences magically morph into active sentences. "We exceed the budget by" "Our process was compliant". It is a stratagem played by our subconscious minds. 

It is a contagion that determines the fate of verbal usage, not its validity. The more we use it, the more its credibility. It mutates, sadly like a virus. I make a prediction now. In the coming decades, reckless metaphors from this pandemic era will profligate un-imaginatively- Mask up, innoculate, sanitize, Pandemic, epidemic, etc. We will touch base with all of them until it wears out. In all the above cases, appropriate noises come out of the larynx, but the author is not involved in choosing words. A sense of inertia takes over, and words hurtle down the keyboard like a train that has gone off the rails. It ends in hubris.   

As the patron saint of clear writing George Orwell said 75 years ago 

" Written English is full of bad habits that spread by imitation. If one gets rid of these habits, one can think more clearly. To think clearly is a necessary first step toward clear writing. The fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers." 

Writing is akin to painting. It conjures up an image in the readers' minds. We laptop-armed elites have a moral responsibility not to botch up the paper with paint strewn all over. It creates a cognitive dissonance among readers. We can reverse this decay one sentence at a time.  

As we think of death and lives in these strange times, I offer the below passage from Richard Dawkins for inspiration.

" We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die as they are never going to be born. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here." 

My piece is an ode to George Orwell and his poignant piece essay written 75 years ago! 

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/