The Eloquent Void: Why Jargon Is a Weapon, Not a Tool
The Sweat of Comprehension
My thumb hovered over the red icon for exactly 0.06 seconds too long before the screen flickered to black. I’d just hung up on my supervisor in the middle of a sentence about ‘iterative scalability.’ It wasn’t a protest. It wasn’t a grand stand against the machine. It was a genuine, clumsy accident born from the fact that my palms were sweating as I tried to parse a 46-page PDF titled ‘Synergistic Deliverables for the Q3 Pivot.’ Now I’m sitting here in the sudden, jarring silence of my apartment, staring at my reflection in the monitor, wondering if I should call back and explain that my coordination failed because my brain was trying to find a noun in a sentence that was 96% adjectives.
“I’ll probably tell him there was a ‘temporary infrastructure instability in my localized communication node.'”
– The Unsaid Truth
Fog of War for Tuesday Afternoons
We pretend that corporate jargon is a joke. We make Dilbert comics about it. We play bingo during Zoom calls when someone says ‘low-hanging fruit’ or ‘north star.’ But as I sit here, waiting for the inevitable Slack message asking why I disappeared, I realize it’s much more sinister than a simple annoyance. Jargon is the fog of war applied to a Tuesday afternoon. It is a linguistic camouflage used by the Corporate Jargon Class to mask the fact that nobody actually knows what the hell is going on. When my boss asks me to ‘operationalize our core competencies,’ he isn’t giving me a task. He is giving me a riddle wrapped in an enigma, designed to ensure that if I fail, it’s because I didn’t ‘align’ well enough, not because the strategy was fundamentally broken.
⚡
The Shibboleth Test
There is a specific kind of power in being incomprehensible. If you can speak the language of the Jargon Class, you are part of the ‘in-group.’ You’ve passed the shibboleth test. It’s a protection racket for the mediocre. If you don’t have a clear strategy, you hide behind a wall of multisyllabic fluff.
I remember reading a company-wide memo once that was 126 words long and contained exactly zero verbs that described a physical action. Everything was ‘facilitating,’ ‘enhancing,’ ‘streamlining,’ or ‘positioning.’ You couldn’t actually do any of it. You could only be it. It’s like trying to eat a meal made of air and expectations.
Ethan C.-P.’s ‘Complexity Tax’ (Correlation)
Correlation tracked over 106 days: Clarity decays into chaos.
Gravitating Toward What’s Real
This is why I find myself gravitating toward things that are real lately. Things that don’t need a deck to explain their value. There’s a brutal honesty in a physical path, a trail that goes from point A to point B without any ‘stakeholder management’ involved. When you’re walking through the mountains, the trail doesn’t ask you to ‘synergize your stride.’ It just asks you to keep moving. I’ve been looking at the clarity of
lately, mostly because their communication is the opposite of the corporate sludge I swim in daily. They tell you where the trail goes, how long it takes, and what you’ll see. There is no ‘leveraging of scenic verticals.’ There is just the mountain. It’s a reminder that language *can* be used to reveal the world rather than hide it.
The Buffer Zone
But we are addicted to the hiding. We use ‘bandwidth’ because saying ‘I’m too tired and stressed to do this right now’ feels like a confession of weakness. We use ‘touch base’ because ‘I want to check if you’ve finished the work yet’ feels too aggressive. Ethan C.-P. once told me that the ultimate goal of corporate jargon is to create a world where no one is ever responsible for anything. If a ‘transition’ fails, it’s just the market dynamics. If a ‘restructuring’ results in 56 people losing their jobs, it’s just ‘right-sizing the organization.’
📞
Authentic Contradiction
Wait, I’m getting another call. It’s him. I’m going to let it ring for 6 seconds while I compose my ‘authentic apology.’ See? Even now, I’m using their words. ‘Authentic.’ As if an apology could be anything else and still count as one. I’m part of the problem.
Precision as Courage
“Prioritizing workflow optimization”
“Finish report by 6 PM Friday”
Maybe that’s what we’re really afraid of: being clear. If I am clear, I can be wrong. The Jargon Class isn’t just a byproduct of big business; it’s a survival strategy for a world that punishes mistakes more than it rewards truth.
🛠️
The Dignity of the Part
I think back to 1996, or maybe it was earlier, when my dad worked in a factory. He didn’t have ‘deliverables.’ He had parts. He made things you could drop on your foot. If the machine broke, he didn’t ‘initiate a diagnostic maintenance protocol.’ He fixed the belt. There was an inherent dignity in that clarity.
The Master of Nothing
I finally answered the call. I told my boss my ‘digital interface encountered an unexpected termination event.’ He didn’t even blink. He just said, ‘No worries, Ethan. Let’s circle back to the core competency discussion when you have more bandwidth.’ I felt a physical ache in my chest. I am 36 years old, and I am fluent in a language that says nothing. I have become a master of the eloquent void.
Clarity is a Crisis
Clarity is so rare in the corporate world that it looks like a crisis. But for now, I’ll just sit here with my 46 slides and my sweating palms, waiting for the next ‘touchpoint’ to begin. I’ll play my part in the Jargon Class, nodding along to the music of the void, while somewhere outside, a real trail is waiting for someone who knows how to speak its language.
