Image: Getty
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Follow the Learning English for Work podcast
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Introduction
Lots of people find jargon annoying. Is it useful in the workplace? Pippa and Phil talk about when to use jargon and when to avoid it, with help from journalist Anna Maloney, Anne Curzan from the University of Michigan and John Fiset from St Mary’s University in Nova Scotia, Canada.
This programme was made in partnership with Business Daily.
Vocabulary
stakeholder
anyone who is involved in an organisation and has an interest in its success
deep dive
look at something in detail
cascade
share information by giving it to a few people, who then pass it on to more people
synergy
the combined power of people working well together, rather than separately
Transcript
Note: This is a transcript of a spoken conversation and is not a word-for-word script.
Phil
Hello and welcome to Learning English for Work and our special series all about jargon. I’m Phil.
Pippa
And I’m Pippa. In this series, we’ve been talking about some of the strange words and phrases we use at work: business jargon.
Phil
As we’ve mentioned in the series, lots of people find jargon annoying or difficult to understand, so today, we’re going to look more at why we use jargon and whether it’s helpful in our working lives.
Pippa
Find a transcript for this episode to read along on our website, bbclearningenglish.com.
Phil
Now, earlier this year, we made a programme all about jargon with our colleagues at Business Daily, a BBC World Service business series. Their reporter Ed Butler spoke to Anna Maloney, a journalist at the London financial newspaper City AM.
And Anna’s been writing a new column highlighting a different piece of corporate jargon each week.
Ed Butler
So, Anna. Let’s just pick up the paper.
Anna Maloney
Yeah.
Ed Butler
So what’ve we got here?
Anna Maloney
Today we’re highlighting stakeholder which I think is a particularly insidious one.
Pippa
Anna’s jargon of the week is stakeholder. Now, this means anyone who’s involved in a company and has an interest in it being successful. So employees are stakeholders, but also the people who own the company are stakeholders, the customers, the clients, all of those kinds of people. But Anna says the word stakeholder has become jargon. She calls it insidious, which means it is gradually causing harm.
Anna Maloney
Most often when you’re referring to a stakeholder, I think people usually are referring to themselves. You know, we need to consider key stakeholders in this decision for everyone to come back in the office five days a week. What that means is, well, I’ve grown rather accustomed to my Friday morning yoga and I don’t want to be back in the office.
Ed Butler
Exactly. You’ve been doing this column for nine months, right?
Anna Maloney
Yes.
Ed Butler
How do people respond to it? Your readers?
Anna Maloney
This has been one feature that our readers have really engaged with. They’re our biggest culprits, but also the biggest haters and I think this is a key feature. You know, we all love to hate it. But, statistically, you know, some of us are also… we’re using it every day.
Phil
Anna says that readers of the newspaper really enjoy the column. But those readers are the same people who use the jargon Anna writes about all the time at work.
So, we’ve got here people are complaining about this jargon, but actually they’re the ones who use it.
Pippa
Yes. I think we’re all guilty of that, Phil. So, often we’ve talked about bits of jargon in this series that we find annoying, but we also use them. And sometimes you actually hear someone complaining about jargon, or a certain phrase they don’t like, and then they use a load of jargon just to… to talk about what they don’t like about it. So it’s everywhere. It’s kind of part of our everyday language at work.
Our colleagues at Business Daily asked BBC World Service listeners on Facebook about business jargon and lots of people mentioned being frustrated by jargon, or hearing it too much at work.
Let’s look at a few examples.
Phil
OK, so we had deep dive, which is where you look at something in detail.
Pippa
Yeah. We had cascade. Somebody suggested this. This is where you pass on information. So, somebody at the top of the organisation sends it to a few people and then they cascade it, they send it to their employees and down the chain of command, as it were.
Phil
And then you have synergy, which is when everyone is working well together, possibly because the information has been well cascaded to them. And it’s this idea that working together is more powerful than everyone working on their own.
Pippa
And interestingly, some commenters said that they’re now retired, but reading all the examples on the Facebook post made them feel quite stressed, so maybe part of why we dislike this language is because it reminds us of work and any stress associated with the world of work.
Phil
So, another common criticism of jargon is that it’s vague. So, it’s difficult to know for sure what someone’s talking about.
Pippa
Yeah, and I spoke to John Fiset who is an expert in workplace culture and language dynamics from Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia in Canada. And John believes that some jargon used by businesses is deliberately difficult to understand.
John Fiset
One of the interesting things about this corporate jargon or corporate… ‘corporatese’ or however you want to say it, is a lot of the time when that’s used, it’s to remove meaning. For example, like, you’re being fired. No, we’re having a corporate downsizing or a rightsizing now, that’s how they’re using these terms. So, it’s again removing some of the pain and removing some of the meaning behind things to seem innocuous. A lot of these terms are meant to kind of mask the real intent behind some of the decisions that are being made and, for that matter, make people sound a little smarter than they… than they are.
Phil
John is concerned that people are using ‘corporatese’, that’s corporate language, to make what they’re saying seem innocuous or harmless.
Pippa
Yes, and we talked about this in our series Office English. We mentioned some of the language used at work to talk about bad news, and it’s not always clear.
Phil
So, John mentioned ‘downsizing’ and ‘rightsizing’. People don’t like these terms, but also people don’t like losing their jobs. It’s a difficult thing for us to talk about.
Pippa
So, I spoke to Anne Curzan, Professor of English language at the University of Michigan, who thinks that sometimes we love to hate jargon just a bit too much.
Anne Curzan
One of the things that you see is that there is language that used to be considered jargon that now we don’t even notice. And a great example of that is the verb ‘finalise’ which in the late 1960s was seen as bureaucratic jargon. It was criticised and really quite soundly disliked and over time over the past few decades, the criticism has declined. And at this point when I tell people that that verb used to be considered jargon, they’re often surprised because it doesn’t feel jargon-y at all. But ‘incentivise’ feels very jargon-y.
Phil
Anne says we often find new words annoying at work. But over time they become normal.
Pippa
Yeah, and this is true of other language change, too. For example, lots of people use new words and phrases on social media, and some people find this annoying or say that the new expressions aren’t proper English, but usually we get used to them over time.
Phil
Yes, new language does often get criticised.
Pippa
And Anne also thinks that our dislike of business jargon in particular could demonstrate what we think about business more generally.
Anne Curzan
Honestly, I think there may also be a deeper concern reflected in criticisms of business jargon about the role of business in our society and there certainly are people who are worried that corporate culture and business generally has taken on an outsized role socially. And that may again get reflected in complaints about business jargon.
Phil
Anne says some people are concerned that corporate culture has an outsized role in our society. That means that the world of work and business is too big a part of our lives.
Pippa
Lots of people criticise jargon, but as Anne Curzan said, gradually, we start to use new jargon terms and then eventually we don’t even think of them as jargon anymore.
Phil
So yeah, in this series, we hope we’ve helped you understand more strange jargon,
what it means and when to use it.
Send us any words and phrases you don’t understand to learning.english@bbc.co.uk.
Pippa
That’s it for this episode of Learning English for Work. We’re taking a break over Christmas and New Year, but we’ll be back with more episodes next year.
Phil
Until then, find loads more resources to help you with your English on our website. Or why not follow our podcast Learning English from the News to learn the language to talk about the big news stories? Search Learning English from the News in your podcast app.
Pippa
And if you want to listen to the full programme we made with Business Daily about business jargon, you can find a link in the notes for this episode. Bye for now.
Phil
Bye.
