Ulysses has one hundred words of hate:
Dear business people – Stop abusing the English language in an attempt to get outside the paradigm and revolutionize the box. Nothing is being impacted. The word is affected. Stop telling people, “Don’t hesitate to contact Joe or myself.” The pronoun is me. Imagine saying, “Give myself a call” to get an idea of how ridiculous you sound. I love language too, but there is nothing awesome about unintentional misuse. Stop cascading ideas. Stop suggesting we let things marinate. Proactivate your brain and accept the fact that attempts to gussy up the banal only impresses idiots while broadcasting your own idiocy.
This basically sums up everything I hated about B-School.* The constant use of highly technical (and
often misappropriated) language to describe mundane processes was extremely
frustrating because it was inefficient and because it felt highly
disingenuous. It was as if middle
managers were expected to confuse the reality of their role in the organization
by misusing language.
I realize now that this practice of using language to hide
reality is neither new nor limited to business school and middle management. Economists, for example, are just as guilty
of padding their language as business people:
[We need to] identify the determinants of intergenerational mobility, with an eye towards finding policies that increase equality of opportunity. Should we be focusing on increasing access to higher education? Changing the structure of elementary schooling? Revamping the tax code?
This is Grade-A bullshit.
Seriously, what is intergenerational mobility? Does it mean moving between generations? Does it mean getting older? Or is it just meaningless jargon that exists
to fill up a press release or university bio?
Of course, verbal camouflage has existed forever. Isaiah speaks of those who called “evil” “good”
and “good” “evil.” It takes some serious
linguistic tricks to reach a point where referring to something as its opposite
sounds reasonable. And yet, we all do
that every day.
We don’t support the murder of innocent babies; we’re merely
“pro-choice.” We don’t have anger
issues; we’re just “passionate.” We don’t
yell; we merely raise our voices. We’re
not arrogant; we’re self-confident. We’re
not obnoxious; we’re opinionated.
Ultimately, though, we recognize the obfuscatory nature of
language. We even embrace it, because we
realize that we only have two choices when confronted with unpleasant realities: change it or change how we speak about
it. When we realize that we have, say,
anger issues, we can either admit this or we can deny it. If we admit it, we are essentially implying
that we must change, unless we convince ourselves that our anger is
acceptable. If we deny it, then we have
to change how we talk about the matter, elsewise we simply continue to be
confronted by our failings.
Thus, we constantly hide behind our words because we cannot
bear to deal with reality. We invest in
our pretty lies, and cannot bear to have them taken away from us, and so we
change how we talk about reality, to hide the unpleasant truths from before our
faces.
On a macro level, we cannot admit that the ideal of free
trade is bad policy, nor can we admit that equality does not exist in any
material form. On a micro level, we
cannot bring ourselves to admit to our flaws, misbehavior, and sins. And so we call reality a lie and we call lies
reality; we call good evil and evil good.
Ultimately, we hide the truth. We
hide the truth behind language.
* From which I’ve finally graduated, for the benefit of
those readers that may care about these things.
