Corporate culture’s buzz words and bad metaphors

Aquick follow-up on our meeting today. To move the ball forward, we’ll need to drill down and do a deep dive after getting buy-in on some of the low hanging fruit. Let’s circle back next week.”

Where did so many people learn to talk like this?

This barrage of buzz words and bad metaphors is the language of corporate culture. We all hate it, but we can’t get away from it even after leaving the office. Emails, social media and LinkedIn, once a convenient repository of resumes, push corporate culture further into our phones, homes, and heads.

Let’s not.

Not real writing

It seems the ticket out of middle management involves posting about productivity or continuous improvement or lean six sigma, whatever that is. People do this in pursuit of likes and shares and that light bulb reaction that I don’t know how to do. This must get them promoted because they won’t stop doing it.

Some think corporate-speak a mark of intelligence. It’s not. It marks a man who’s never read Hemingway. Or maybe never read anything but corporate productions.

Where did everyone learn to write (and talk) like this?

Somewhere, somehow, we’ve forgotten the principles that underlie real writing.

I say real writing because there’s nothing real about ball moving or deep diving, just so we’re on the same page. Such writing takes something human and makes it meaningless. I still don’t know where that flagpole is that everyone is running it up.

“Use figures of speech sparingly,” say Strunk and White. There’s nothing wrong with metaphor, but metaphor is a literary device. Such devices should be used purposefully and artfully and well. Corporate America has abused it to the point that we can’t take it anymore. We don’t have the bandwidth for it.

“Write in a way that comes naturally,” say Strunk and White. As corporate lingo displaces prose, this gets harder to do.

Corporate culture’s talk

No one taught anyone to write this way. This language took over because corporate culture is taking over. Resisting it feels like trying to boil the ocean.

But resist we must, because we have to fight for clarity. And perhaps this resistance is not so hopeless. Writing is learned, or can be learned, by imitating. “The use of language,” say Strunk and White, “begins with imitation.” We just need good books to admire and imitate. And maybe a little help.

Here’s a story to help. Our freshman writing class had submitted our first paper to Dr. Wissolik. Wissolik was as old as he was eccentric. He was also a legend, the kind of professor who got away with things no one else could, partly because people feared him and partly because he didn’t care. This made many of us like him.

Disheveled but nonetheless dignified, Wissolik burst into class, our papers in hand. “You!” he screamed looking directly at me. Wissolik was in a bad mood that semester. He’d recently stopped smoking after sixty or so years of cigarettes.

I stared back at him. I’d be lying to say I wasn’t scared. “What is this?” he screamed again. And then he started reading my paper for the whole class to hear.

Don’t use old words

I’d been reading lots of old books with old words, so I figured I’d write in their old style. If they wrote that way and we still read them, it must be good, I thought. After about a paragraph, he looked up at me, “Do you see the problem here? The problem is that we don’t write like this anymore. Do you get that?”

I did.

“Who’s your favorite author?” he asked.

“Kurt Vonnegut,” I replied. “Vonnegut! Does he write like this? No! Do what he does.”

Dr. Wissolik has since passed away, but he’s still teaching and we’re still learning. I miss him. So it goes.