Round and Round

Over at Vulture, Molly Young writes about "garbage language," or the horrendous outpouring of nonsense phrases, acronyms, repurposed words and whatnot that afflict people who try to work in businesses and offices.

Part of Young's purpose is to try to find out why this kind of language has become the kudzu of the workplace. Even when communications consultants or advisers come in and -- often using their own special cache of garbage language -- point out how this sort of stuff makes it harder to be understood than easier, it persists. If by some miracle it's killed, it rises like an unstaked vampire and feeds until the problem is as bad or worse than before. I've always thought that some of the fuel for this kind of lexical fog was similar to that found in academia: If I hit a sufficient percentage of obscurancy in my communication you have to keep me around because you don't know what I'm talking about and you don't want to have to do my job yourself.

According to Young, one of the reasons people deploy garbage language is also part of its greatest problem: It confirms, she says, that delusion is an asset in the modern workplace. The speakers of garbage language convince themselves that their verbal deformations are actually better than the plain brown wrapper of the basic grammar textbook. They are being more precise, more descriptive, more efficient! One or another of them who might have read an avant-garde stylist like Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson might even believe they are being more creative. Lord knows Wolfe could press a word into service for which it did not seem fit, until after he did it, and they believe they might just tread that path too.

But they don't. As Young says, it's a delusion. For most everyone who tries to do a job, the best memo is not exciting or zingy or cutting edge in its vocabulary. It's the one that spells out what the job is, how it needs to be done, who should be doing it and when it should be finished. In the course of my working life I have run across a couple of supervisors who understood that. May their tribe ever increase.