Why we can't stop using corporate jargon

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 27 September 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ever been stuck in a meeting drowning in buzzwords? Terms like "synergies", "low-hanging fruit" or "deliverables"?

They're just a few examples of corporate jargon. A lexicon of colourful metaphors, buzzwords and acronyms that you’d never use with friends or family but have become common parlance in the world of international business.

Workplace lingo might serve as a useful industry short-hand, or a way to gel with colleagues, but it can also irritate, obscure meaning or even hide unpleasant truths. And it's more prevalent than ever.

In this episode, we team up with our colleagues at BBC Learning English to explore the origins and purpose of corporate language and why we love to hate it; hearing from workplace culture and linguistics experts, professionals in the City of London, a plain-talking CEO, and some of you - the BBC World Service audience.

(Picture: Business people looking at sticky notes on a glass board as part of an upskill workshop. Credit: Getty Images.)

Presenters: Ed Butler and Pippa Smith Producer: Elisabeth Mahy

Want to learn more about this topic? Click on Related links or go to: https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/english/features/business-jargon/240925

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi there, I'm Ed Butler, and this is Business Daily from the BBC World Service.
0:06.1	Today we're breaking down a complex and sometimes confusing aspect of modern work-life.
0:12.6	It's corporate jargon.
0:14.1	I hate it. All the acronyms, all the method force that I don't understand.
0:18.6	I love it. Really?
0:20.0	Sound more important, that now?
0:21.2	Yeah.
0:21.9	From synergies to touching base blue sky thinking to boiling the ocean,
0:27.0	we're exploring why language like this exists and how it shapes our working lives.
0:34.1	Initially, it can be a bit alienating because you do not know what people are talking about,
0:38.3	but after a while, it's kind of nice, I guess, because you feel like you belong.
0:42.1	Yes, jargon might serve as a useful industry shorthand or a way to gel with colleagues,
0:48.1	but it can also irritate some of us, obscure meaning, even hide unpleasant truths.
0:53.3	For example, like you're being fired.
0:56.1	No, we're having a corporate downsizing or a right sizing now.
0:59.8	We're going to be looking at the psychology of jargon today
1:03.2	and why some business leaders want to throw it into the lexical waste bin.
1:08.9	A lot of the time people use to push up values of businesses
1:12.1	that they're doing something really sexy and different and interesting
1:16.6	and here's all this new language that's associated with it.
1:19.7	Breaking down corporate language barriers.
1:22.4	That's here on Business Daily from the BBC.
	...

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