YOU SAID IT!

You are all you need to succeed. I don’t know who said this, but when I came across this line recently on a poster in the corridor of a major multinational firm, in about font size 55, no less, I was instantly swept away by its profundity and the instant sense of empowerment it imparted.

For a moment I thought I had it all – a cape, a magic wand, a flashy body suit and most importantly, the powers to zip around the world, saving it from all evils.

And then, just like how it happens in comic strips, pop – scepticism pricked my thought-bubble and reality kicked in. I almost felt duped and stupid.

The self-help gurus and life coaches of the world have made a fortune peddling attention-grabbing catchphrases, I felt. So much so that all the jargon has popped out of management books and taken prime space in corporate speak. In fact, I have come to the conclusion that words of jargon these days are considered to be synonyms for well-articulated thoughts. Garnish your sentences with a handful of them and you would not only succeed in making an instant impact on the innocents around you, but would escape the need to explain or qualify your thoughts. Jargon, we have come to believe, has that kind of sweeping self-explanatory powers.

And that precisely is the reason why they are so vapid and stink of laziness – in both thought and language. We fail to understand that by spewing jargon at every given opportunity, we are portraying an image of that stereotypical slick-talking salesman we were always told to never trust.

The self-help gurus and life coaches of the world have made a fortune out of peddling attention-grabbing catchphrases

Even though we are able to see through the vacuous nature of these metaphors, as Colin Drury points out in the feature ‘Office Jargon’ on page 22, these metaphors are not going to die anytime soon. Thanks to social media and the all-pervading powers of the internet, they are turning out to be self-feeding monsters.

It’s about time we peel the onion on this issue and think outside the box on how we can bring about a paradigm shift.

PS: Emojis are pet peeves too, but I’ll reserve my rant on them for another occasion.