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Corporate email lingo meme12/31/2023 To me, it was clear that this language served as a detection system to identify insiders and outsiders. They even made up abbreviations that took exactly as long to say as the full-length words, simply because it sounded more exclusive - harder for “un-cool people” to understand. At my cliquey old magazine job, employees spoke almost entirely in inscrutable abbreviations (or “abbrevs”). But garbage language does just the opposite - instead, it often causes speakers to feel confused and intellectually deficient. Of course, in any given professional field, specialized lingo is frequently necessary in order to exchange information more succinctly and specifically it makes communication clearer. The ’90s brought computer imagery: “bandwidth,” “ping me,”, “let’s take this offline.” In the twenty-first century, with a start-up culture and the dissolution of work-life separation (the Google ball pits and in-office massage therapists) in combination with movements toward “transparency” and “inclusion,” we got mystical, politically correct, self-empowerment language: “holistic,” “actualize,” “alignment.”Ī post shared by Corporate Natalie the global pandemic, as most of our communication has transitioned to email and Zoom, it seems many of us have become more keenly sensitive to garbage language’s eerie insincerity. In the 1980s, it reeked of the stock exchange: “buy-in,” “leverage,” “volatility.” And now, evidently, the meme-sphere has come to enjoy mocking it, tooīut where does garbage language come from? As it turns out, corporate-speak has been around for decades, though its themes change with the times. Personally, I was always creeped out by this cult-like conformism and enjoyed parodying it in my free time. My old boss especially loved when everyone needlessly transformed nouns into transitive verbs and vice versa - “whiteboard” to “whiteboarding,” “sunset” to “sunsetting,” the verb “ask” to the noun “ask.” People used these terms even when it was obvious they didn’t know quite what they were saying or why. I used to work as a full-time editor at an online beauty magazine, where my colleagues were always throwing around woo-woo garbage metaphors like “synergy” (the state of being on the same page), “move the needle” (make noticeable progress), and “mindshare” (something having to do with a brand’s popularity? I’m still not sure). In her memoir, Uncanny Valley, tech reporter Anna Wiener christened this unnatural vernacular “garbage language.” Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener, $15.30 Amazon
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