Friday, September 20, 2013

Intellectual Posturing and the Art of Corporate Bullshit


Someone complained that a subsequent article on "Trainspotting" showed only that I'm posing as an intellectual.  I don't know how the individual came to that conclusion but the author was, at best, sub-literate so a dog finding its way home would probably seem quite a feat of intellectual prowess.  I do think "Trainspotting" is an important movie or I wouldn't have written the article as that would have wasted my time and yours.

The previous article wasn't an example of intellectual posturing ... this one is:

Language has become a wasteland of affectation in which people are trying desperately to sound intelligent and they have assumed the lingo of corporate staff meetings.  Such meetings are called by people who were business majors and who have no more command of the language than the average porcupine.  I'm not exaggerating as I've had multiple dealings with vice presidents and above and their incompetence in written expression was embarrassing to behold.  If it's your purpose to sound like a porcupine then good luck to you but, assuming that is true, you have probably already left and are now rooting around in the garden to find insects to eat.

People in staff meetings often think it sounds more intelligent to use big words even when smaller ones will serve very well.  One of the most common examples is the substitution of utilise for use.  Both mean the same thing but corporate types seem to think they are paid by the syllable.  Considering their outrageous salaries, perhaps that premise is true.  Also considering those enormous salaries, one might think they would have a strong need for clarity of expression to prevent wasting anyone else's time but that's not at all true.

Another example of expensive syllables is in the use of replicate.  It's not enough to copy something, instead one must replicate it.  The only other environment in which I have heard replicate being commonly used is the field of genetics regarding the way DNA and RNA work.  How replicate made its way from hard science to a corporate boardroom is left to the interested scientist to discover.

When one doesn't know a pretentious substitution for a word, one can still try to sound intelligent by adding an unnecessary word.  One example that occurs fairly frequently is the use of polar opposite.  The expression has meaning in geometry but it adds nothing otherwise.  Another example comes from someone in an extreme state of corporate desperation who will refer to two entities as being diametrically opposed.  It's the same as a polar opposite as both refer to a line going to the opposite side of the circle (i.e. the diameter) so it must pass through the center.

Opposite has a yet more pretentious synonym as an Englishman might refer to Australians as antipodean creatures.  The word still only means they are opposites as Australians live on the other end of the Earth from England but use of the word in a corporate staff meeting may help give the impression the speaker does something more in spare time than collecting baseball cards.  It's not likely but perhaps.

A slightly different variety of this type of verbal perversion is the joining of two simple words to give the impression of something more complex.  An example is when a corporate stooge says an event could negatively impact the company's bottom line.  It would be simpler and more effective to say the bottom line will be damaged but that only matters if you are being paid for the thought rather than for the word.  The problem isn't so much that some speak unclearly but rather that such expressions get imitated, erm, replicated by every crackhead at the table.

Some aspects of corporate lingo are surprisingly colourful as someone judging a product as having no value might comment that the dog won't hunt.  If someone judges another's perspective to be in error, he might comment that we all need the same view of the elephant.  For example, someone studying only an elephant's tiny eyes might assume the elephant to be a much smaller animal, perhaps the size of the dog and, well, that dog won't hunt.

I'm somewhat apologetic that some will regard this article as pedantic but Noam Chomsky is likely one of the smartest people on the planet and he's been clear that our view of life, the universe, and everything is only limited by our ability to describe it.  Deliberately limiting our abilities to describe it through ineffective expression is unfortunate and, in my view, warrants protest.  At the end of the day, self-limiting speech negatively impacts our view of the elephant and thus there isn't any dog that will hunt.

Don't be sitting back smugly on Facebook as if this sort of thing doesn't happen on social networks as there is probably no other institution more limiting of world view than those that claim to expand it.  There is almost no original thought on Facebook and the majority of activity in that environment is either liking something someone else has contributed or sharing it (i.e. copying it).

No comments: