idle gaze 068: the weird wonderland of corporate jargon
portmanteaus, nonsense words and strange creatures.
The essay was originally published in the second issue of Playground, a bi-annual magazine featuring writing and conversations designed for those working in, or curious about, Europe’s cultural and creative industries. You can order a copy online, or find it IRL in stockists including Do You Read Me?! in Berlin, Papercut in Stockholm and Athenaeum in Amsterdam. The print edition also features some beautiful accompanying illustrations by Staselė Jakunskaitė.
The inevitable reality of growing up is witnessing the innocent curiosity and infinite imagination of youth make room for the concrete rules and serious sensibility of adulthood. The future, once seen as a dazzling kaleidoscope of possibilities, starts to set in stone, diminished to a limited set of blueprints and paths set out before us. What ifs are reduced to what shoulds. Endless opportunities quashed by cast-iron protocols.
But let's travel back in time for a moment, back to early childhood. Remind yourself how it felt when the world was not yet fully in focus, instead filled with exciting unknowns and mysteries aching to be solved.
Learning to walk, we would stumble around, finding our feet. We would stumble with our vocabulary, too, smashing syllables and vowels together at random angles to see what would stick. We created made-up words and secret languages – language was our verbal Play-Doh. We invented whole new universes where the only rule was that there were no rules.
The passing of time is inexorable and as we enter adulthood, life becomes ridden with rules. We are expected to use correctly assigned dictionary words the way they were intended. You can’t simply go about daily, civi life and invent new phrases without being met with at least a few raised eyebrows and confused glances.
Luckily, there is still one domain of adultness where caution is thrown to the wind, where the only rule is that there are no rules: office lingo. In the wild west of modern business parlance, anything goes – nouns can be turned into verbs (please action that ASAP!), verbs can be turned into nouns (what will be the impact of this decision?). Who would have expected that the realm of Slack messages, email chains, and Zoom meetings would become the last bastion of play in adult life? A place where we still have total agency to experiment endlessly with language like verbal Play-Doh?
It makes sense that office workers often refer to the end of the business day as ‘end of play’, because judging by the language we use, the workplace is where we go to play pretend. Project managers talk about projects like they’re daring pilots, maintaining ‘holding patterns’ while discussing status updates at the ‘30,000-foot level’. Sometimes, when things get a little chaotic, the team must do the unthinkable: ‘build the plane as you fly it’.
Meanwhile, executives in cutthroat strategy meetings will often – with total sincerity – discuss ‘low-hanging fruit’ (referring to easily achievable targets). Every time I hear that phrase, I can’t help but reminisce about childhood summers sneaking around gardens stealing ripened cherries and blackberries from unsuspecting neighbours.
Marketing managers, strategists and industry experts are modern-day Lewis Carrolls, creating surreal universes filled with newly invented portmanteaus and nonsense words. Like Alices in Wonderland, they love pulling apart and reassembling words in strange formations, rolling them in glitter and paint. Content you can learn from? Why not call it ‘edutainment’? Teams working together synchronously? Let’s zhuzh it up and say ‘synergy’. Prefixes and suffixes are added to established trends with reckless abandon (influencers who don’t wanna influence? Let’s call them ‘de-influencers’).
And like kids drawn to candy, we’ve realised that everything is more fun when there’s a food analogy involved, elevating the mundaneity of work terminology into a tasty puzzle adventure. Content that’s short and engaging? Snackable and bite-sized. And if that content is good enough, we add it to the agency’s sizzle reel.
And it’s not just the marketing industry that likes to dabble in whimsical language. Silicon Valley loves it, too. VC firms have a knack for injecting the objectively disenchanted world of spreadsheets and bottom lines with magical creatures, referring to one billion dollar valuation start-ups as ‘unicorns’ (and in an additional stroke of toddler-like genius, dubbing soon-to-be one billion valuations as ‘soonicorns’.) Even negative outcomes are rebranded with playful imagination – soon-to-be-abandoned business ideas are not merely dismantled but dazzlingly ‘sunsetted’.
Understandably, there’s a sense of scepticism with language taken to an unreasonably abstract extreme. As Molly Young argued in New York Magazine a few years ago, the intermingling of modern business and New Age speak can often feel like a trick mirror that either hides a lack of understanding (“a series of false bottoms – you just keep falling deeper and deeper into gibberish”) or inflates importance (“hiding a deeper anxiety about our relationship to work — a sense that what we’re doing may actually be trivial”).
That frustration is valid. But there are two sides to this coin. Approached with sincere curiosity, playful corporate wordsmithing is anything but trivial. Yes, language can muddle and confuse. It’s easy to hide behind made-up words and nonsensical jargon. But it can also be the vessel in which radically new avenues of thinking can be unlocked. If you have the courage to name, reframe, and contextualise ideas in a way that defies limiting conventions and captures the collective imagination, you can encourage teams, industries and even society as a whole to think a little differently.
The reality is that we’re living in a fast-evolving, highly networked and complex world, where new ideas and paradigms are emerging faster than we can establish terms to describe them. We glue words together and invent new phrases, like bright-eyed children stumbling across new and mysterious experiences, because it is a necessity in order to not be left behind. And if you want to envision a radically new world, you need to be able to break free from the rigid linguistics that adulthood enforces on us.
Courtney Hohne, former chief storyteller for The Moonshot Factory – Google’s vanguard innovation lab – once argued that the secret to creating cutting-edge technology can lie in something as soft and abstract as daring to get creative with language:
“Everyone has the potential to be brave, audacious, and radically creative, but we often put ceilings on ourselves with mindsets or habits that trap us on conventional trails of thought. A powerful vocabulary can help us resist forces that limit our thinking without us even realising it…chosen carefully, words don’t just describe innovation – they enable it.”
When you begin to appreciate this subtle yet powerful influence words can have on unlocking new thinking, you see it everywhere. Unusual linguistic choices that hint at a vision of the world or a deeper yearning for what an idea can achieve – fuelled by a youthful naivety.
I thought about this while reading up on the origins of generative AI and GPT. It all started with eight former Google employees and a paper introducing the notion of ‘Generative Pre-training Transformers’. Why call the key mechanism behind the technology a ‘transformer’? According to a Wired profile detailing the origins of the paper, the founders needed a name that would represent just how disruptive this emerging technology was. One of the paper’s authors – Jakob Uszkoreit – picked the word ‘transformers’ because he had childhood memories of playing with the Hasbro action figures – robots that could shapeshift into planes, cars, and animals. He felt it was the perfect, relatable representation of how GPT could magically ‘transform’ as much understanding from data as a human might.
A digital system so advanced its output often feels like the product of an alien civilisation – described through the lens of a childhood memory. To me, that sums up the power of imaginative wordsmithing – the ability to turn the inexplicably complex and abstract into something tangible and inspiring. That’s how I remember trying to make sense of the world as a child, freewheeling my way through endless summers, inventing silly words for ideas and feelings I did not yet fully grasp. A time before the playful curiosity and infinite imagination of youth had made room for the concrete rules and serious sensibility of adulthood.
Love every bit of this essay, thanks for contributing, Alexi!