Garbage language has invaded every aspect of our lives. You see it in the foodie world:

The food world got stranger and weirder to me right while I was deep in it. The “waiter” became the “server,” the “restaurant business” became the “hospitality industry,” what used to be the “customer” became the “guest,” what was once your “personality” became your “brand,” the small acts of kindness and the way you always used to have of sharing your talents and looking out for others became things to “monetize.”

And in tech:

Whether it’s synergistically leveraging strategic competitive advantages or disintermediating retail channels with bleeding-edge technologies, workplace jargon is a staple of the modern organization. Yet few things are more universally annoying…Like fashion, it’s often faddish, changing seasonally (“cutting edge” became “bleeding edge” after “think outside the box” became a cliche).  

In business too:

“People used a sort of nonlanguage, which was neither beautiful nor especially efficient: a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime metaphors, inflated with self-importance. Calls to action; front lines and trenches; blitzscaling. Companies didn’t fail, they died.” [Wiener] describes a man who wheels around her office on a scooter barking into a wireless headset about growth hacking, proactive technology, parallelization, and the first-mover advantage. “It was garbage language,” Wiener writes, “but customers loved him.”

And I’ve written before about the way woo woo wellness folks speak like weirdos:

I’m sitting with discomfort, respecting boundaries, and being present while naming the trauma of my lived experience. I’m processing my pain and examining the codependent relationships I’ve participated in due to my avoidant attachment style….As I move forward in my healing journey, I know I need to do the work, be an active listener, hold space, and…

Heck, even dog adoption sites sound like real estate brokers trying to upsell a money pit: 

Posts describing the dogs drip with euphemisms: A dog that might freak out and tear your house up if left alone is a “Velcro dog”; one that might knock down your children is “overly exuberant”; a skittish, neglected dog with trust issues is just a “shy party girl.” 

We’re drowning in words devoid of meaning; the kind of language Nietzsche described as “coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” It’s the American way, explained George Carlin: "Americans have trouble facing the truth. So they invent a kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it.” We constantly sacrifice clarity for a modicum of (phony) comfort.

Signalling, not communicating

Why do we love this kind of jargon? It isn’t about communication, it’s about signalling. For one thing, it shows you’re an insider…

Jargon can facilitate social bonding between speakers and audiences by reinforcing a shared identity. Google, for example, helps new recruits learn “googly” terms during their onboarding. Jargon is also a linguistic tool that people can use — consciously or unconsciously — to signal their membership in a professional community. For example, using the term “ink stick” instead of “pen” might signal current or former membership in the U.S. military.

It’s also a status play.

Jargon sometimes functions like a fancy title, a conspicuously displayed trophy, or an expensive, branded watch — people use it to signal status and show off to others…People often compensate for a lack of status by trying to signal that they have more of it than they actually do. They may conspicuously advertise their accomplishments or highlight their memberships in prestigious groups. For example, lower-status academics are more likely to include “Dr.” or “PhD” in their email signatures than those with higher status.

Speaking jargonese lets the speaker subtly elevate themselves. It’s a big reason why many are gung ho about using woke terms. The subtext is we (the people who speak “properly”) are educated and they (those who fail to do so) are backwards. “Using the latest term for a minority often shows not sensitivity but subscribing to the right magazines or going to the right cocktail parties,” writes linguist Steven Pinker. The same way Vogue readers mock midwestern frocks, the Twitterati look down at those who can’t keep up with the latest au couture phraseology.

Alas, it’s a bad way to get converts or win elections since jargon tends to, y’know, make someone unlikeable.

Jargon can make people feel excluded. It can sound meaningless and be called bullsh*t…We’ve also found that jargon use can hurt impressions of a speaker; audiences often view these speakers as conniving, manipulative, or less likeable.

Going back to the workplace, garbage language in that setting also helps cover up our deeper anxieties about the meaninglessness of our jobs.

When we adopt words that connect us to a larger project — that simultaneously fold us into an institutional organism and insist on that institution’s worthiness — it is easier to pretend that our jobs are more interesting than they seem. Empowerment language is a self-marketing asset as much as anything else: a way of selling our jobs back to ourselves.

The real way to impress

The weird thing is the people who are actually in charge don’t speak like this. Studies show jargon is used by people preoccupied with how they’ll be judged by others. Example: Authors from lower-status schools used more jargon in their titles on average than authors from higher-status schools.

You wanna seem like a higher up? Talk simply and clearly. Think of Denzel Washington’s character, lawyer Joe Miller, in the movie “Philadelphia.” He repeatedly interrupts people with this request: “Explain it to me like I’m an 8 year old.”

It’s not that Miller’s stupid, in fact it’s exactly the opposite. He knows that to get to clarity, you need simplification, and if the speaker can’t boil a thought down to something a child can grasp, then there’s a good chance that Miller won’t hear exactly what’s being communicated.

Similarly, Warren Buffett writes his annual letter as if he’s talking to his sisters.

“It’s ‘Dear Doris and Bertie’ at the start and then I take that off at the end,” Buffett [says]. That’s because, for Doris and Bertie, “Berkshire is pretty much their whole investment.” And although they’re smart, Buffett says, his sisters are “not active in business, so they’re not reading about it every day. I pretend that they’ve been away for a year and I’m reporting to them on their investment.”

You see it with successful comedians, storytellers, Ted Talks, etc. Simple phrasing with meaty ideas is the winning combination.

Garbage language is a red flag that someone doesn’t really have anything to communicate. It’s the refuge for people with hollow ideas. If you’ve got something smart to say, just say it directly without relying on gobbledygook.

Share

Subscribe

Last chance to sign up for the paid plan before prices go up. I’ll even give ya 20% off. Get in the mix…

Get 20% off for 1 year

Comedy

🤪 Check out my most recent standup clips on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

🤪 Recently at Funny How (my comedy-centric newsletter):

🤪 Get more Matt Ruby comedy in your life. Links for all the shows listed below here.✌️

• NYC: Misguided Meditation with Matt Ruby at Caveat on Oct. 18.

• NYC: Hot Soup every Tuesday at Comedy Cellar.

• NYC: Good Eggs every Wednesday at NY Comedy Club ($5 tix with code "scrambled").

• NOLA: I'll be appearing at Hell Yes Fest in NOLA next month.

• My Substance special is in the final stages of editing and coming soon.

Quickies

🎯 It’s kind of crazy there are two big coffee chains and the one that realized we all want pumpkin stuff is NOT the one that ends in -unkin’.

🎯 Of course we're in decline. All empires crumble eventually. And I know this because right now I've got my feet up on an Ottoman; these guys used to have an entire EMPIRE and now we only know 'em as footstool folks. Centuries from now someone’s gonna be using a Squatty Potty and calling it an American.

🗯 Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, on misheard lyrics (aka mondegreens).

I’ve generally found that the words to songs I thought I heard in the works of others were more colorful and enigmatically apt than the words I eventually discovered were intended. More to my personal taste. I assume the same is true of my own work. Mishearing can be as much a strength as a liability. People, accidentally overhearing their own thoughts, are inclined to like what they hear, self-recognized at a distance and mistaken for another.

🎯 No word has lost more meaning over the past decade than "epic." It used to mean we were gonna watch a battle in some sweeping landscape with 50 bizarre characters...now it means you failed so bad someone turned it into a meme.

🗯 Nightlife vet Richie Akiva says velvet ropes at nightclubs are over. The new thing: members only clubs. RIP “feis kontrol.”

Akiva seems to think those days of velvet ropes and tough door guys — “Like quarterbacks, calling all the plays” — are over. “You can’t do that anymore because it’s just not with the time. You’ll get outed or something. You’re prejudiced or racist or this or that,” he tells me, peeved possibly with this era of “safer-space” policies and woke scrutiny. Indeed, in 2013, Allure published ten rules for getting inside 1Oak. Among them: “Reveal the body” and “Don’t make eye contact.” Akiva won’t say anything negative or, for that matter, much of anything positive about his industry colleagues, but he will admit, “Nobody’s making it fun.” He strikes me as the rare club kid of yore who will just come out and admit it to the youngster: It was better back then.

🎯 When I was young, all the people who only cared about making money went into finance and consulting. Over time, I slowly saw all these people – and those like them – migrate over to tech. That's when I realized: Tech is just finance for people who want to seem not evil.

🎯 We often talk about the glass ceiling facing women but never the glass basement – aka how frequently men rock bottom in ultrapainful ways (see: suicide, jail, homelessness, etc.) that women don't. Men: Higher highs, lower lows!

🎯 The ultimate example of why you need to separate the art from the artist is democracy (the art) and the founding fathers (the artist).

🗯 Fine, I admit it I cried when reading this story about the Aaron Judge home run that changed a kid's life.

The crowd roared loud enough that it drowned out Lanzillotta yelling to Derek, "I told you we'd get one -- I told you!"

But Derek heard him. And when he got to Lanzillotta, his joy came out through an outpouring of tears. Lanzillotta patted Derek on the back and then palmed the back of his head like a mini basketball.

"Some day, you're going to be in my shoes and can make a kid happy," Lanzillotta said. "Promise me you'll pay it forward."

"I promise," Derek said, and he cried some more as Lanzillotta put his hands on his cheeks. Then Derek hugged his dad. And they cried together.

Up ahead: Musings on edibles, separation anxiety, Anthony Bourdain’s addiction hopping, Don’t Worry Darling, Al Qaeda, Raya, advertising, unreality/fascism, and more...