I’m currently gripping a lukewarm paper cup of what the breakroom label calls ‘Artisanal Morning Roast,’ though it tastes more like 49 wet napkins dissolved in battery acid. Across the desk, the screen is glowing with a memo that just arrived. It’s from a Vice President of something called Global Enablement, and it informs us that we are about to ‘right-size our human capital resources to refine our go-to-market value-streams.’ My brain hurts. Not the kind of hurt you get from doing hard math, but a dull, rhythmic throb that happens when language is used to erase reality rather than describe it. This isn’t just a memo; it’s a linguistic fog machine designed to obscure the fact that 299 people are about to lose their health insurance on a Tuesday morning.

The Naked Word

I catch myself doing it too. Last week, I told a colleague we needed to ‘socialize the deck’ before the ‘deep dive.’ I felt a piece of my soul shrivel and fall off. Why couldn’t I just say ‘I’ll show you the slides before we talk about them’? Because simplicity is dangerous in a corporate environment. Simplicity is naked. If you use simple words, people can see exactly what you’re thinking, and more importantly, they can see when you aren’t thinking at all. Jargon is the professional equivalent of the ‘distract and disappear’ smoke bomb. It’s the camouflage we wear so the predators of middle management can’t distinguish us from the background noise of the quarterly reports.

Jasper G. once told me about his hobby of comparing prices for identical electronic components across 99 different websites. He finds a strange, meditative peace in the clarity of a spec sheet. A processor either has 19 cores or it doesn’t. A screen either has a 129Hz refresh rate or it doesn’t. There is no ‘leveraging of visual excellence’ in a hardware list; there is only the data. I spent 49 minutes yesterday following his lead, looking at the way some platforms handle the sale of simple devices. When you look at something like Bomba.md, the relief is almost physical. You are looking at a phone. It has a price. It has a battery life. It does not promise to ‘synergize your mobile lifestyle.’ It just exists as a tool, clearly defined and honestly presented. It makes you realize how much energy we waste decoding the nonsense at the office.

The Erosion of Reality

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from a 59-minute meeting where no one uses a single concrete noun. We talk about ‘platforms’ that aren’t made of wood, ‘ecosystems’ that contain no living plants, and ‘solutions’ that haven’t solved a single problem since 2019. It’s a linguistic erosion. When we stop using words that have physical anchors, we lose our ability to think critically about the world we’re building. You can’t protest a ‘realignment’ as easily as you can protest a ‘firing.’ The former sounds like a natural, almost geological shift. The latter sounds like something a person does to another person. And that’s exactly the point.

I remember a project I worked on 9 years ago. We were building an internal tool for 149 employees. The brief was 39 pages of ‘agile-centric deliverables’ and ‘holistic integration touchpoints.’ After three months, nobody knew what the tool was supposed to do. We had spent so much time ‘aligning our visions’ that we forgot to write the code. When we finally demoed it, the CEO asked why the ‘user interface didn’t facilitate seamless onboarding.’ I wanted to tell him it was because the developers had spent the last 29 days trying to figure out what he meant by ‘seamless.’ Instead, I told him we were ‘iterating on the feedback loop to enhance the UX.’ He nodded. He was satisfied with the lie because it was wrapped in the familiar plastic of corporate speak.

Trust Decays in the Fog

This detachment from reality has a cost. It’s not just annoying; it’s corrosive to trust. When a leader stands in front of a room of 599 people and says that ‘transparency is our core value’ while using words that act as a opaque wall, the employees stop listening. They don’t just stop listening to the jargon; they stop listening to everything. The human brain is finely tuned to detect bullshit, and when the bullshit is constant, the brain simply shuts down the reception. We become ghosts in the machine, nodding at the right times, using the right keywords in our emails, but never actually connecting.

I’ve made mistakes here. I once tried to ‘leverage the bandwidth’ of my own relationship during a particularly stressful month. I told my partner that we needed to ‘streamline our domestic workflows.’ She looked at me like I was a stranger who had just broken into the house. She didn’t want a workflow; she wanted me to wash the dishes. That was a turning point for me. I realized that the linguistic fog had followed me home. I was trying to avoid the vulnerability of saying ‘I’m overwhelmed and I need help’ by using the cold, sterile language of the office. It was a cowardly move. It was a shield against the accountability of being a partner.

The Closed Loop of Nonsense

Jasper G. argues that we are living in a post-meaning era of communication. He points to the way 89% of marketing copy is now generated by AI that has been trained on other AI-generated marketing copy. It’s a closed loop of nonsense. We are reaching a point where the words are just textures. Like the background music in a grocery store, corporate jargon isn’t meant to be analyzed; it’s meant to create a certain atmosphere of ‘professionalism.’ But it’s a fake professionalism. Real professionalism is the ability to explain a complex idea to a 9-year-old without losing the essence of the truth.

Think about the last time you read a mission statement. Was it 29 words of pure, unadulterated fluff? ‘We empower global communities through innovative, scalable paradigms.’ If you replace ’empower’ with ‘ignore’ and ‘communities’ with ‘wallets,’ does the sentence feel more or less honest? Usually, it feels exactly the same, because the original words didn’t have any weight to begin with. They were placeholders. They were the linguistic equivalent of the ‘lorem ipsum’ text that designers use to fill space before the real content arrives. Except in the corporate world, the real content never arrives.

Reclaiming the ‘Move!’

We need a rebellion of the specific. We need to start asking ‘What does that mean?’ in the middle of meetings. We need to demand that ‘leverage’ be replaced with ‘use’ and ‘synergy’ be replaced with ‘working together.’ It’s a small act of defiance, but it’s a necessary one. If we don’t reclaim our language, we lose our ability to describe our own experiences. We become the ‘human capital’ we are so often called-just another resource to be ‘refined’ and ‘allocated’ by a spreadsheet that doesn’t know how to cry.

Yesterday, Jasper G. and I sat in a park and watched 19 children play on a slide. There was no ‘interdisciplinary collaboration’ happening. There was just a kid at the top and a kid at the bottom. One of them yelled, ‘Move!’ It was the most honest piece of communication I had heard all week. It was clear, it was direct, and it achieved the desired result immediately. There was no need for a follow-up email to ‘sync’ on the sliding schedule. There was no need to ‘operationalize the descent.’ There was just the slide and the child and the movement.

We are so afraid of the ‘Move!’ in our professional lives. We are afraid that if we are that direct, we will be seen as aggressive or, worse, simple-minded. So we bury the ‘Move!’ under 129 layers of ‘strategic positioning’ and ‘contingency planning.’ We wait for the right ‘cadence’ to suggest that maybe, perhaps, we should do something different. And in that waiting, the opportunity to actually move often disappears. We are left standing at the top of the slide, debating the ‘ergonomics of the experience’ until the sun goes down and the park closes.