Bandwidth is troubling, because it’s just one of many phrases that assume we are mere cogs in the machine
Allow me to totter onto my rickety soapbox for a second, and say: business jargon has gone too far. Buzzwords have become so entrenched into working life that they have, in effect, become a second language. One that, like a much-needed laxative, we are forced to digest to keep daily operations running smoothly. If you don’t use (or at least nod energetically along with) phrases like ‘low-hanging fruit’ or suggest that someone ‘circle back’ so that you can ‘create synergy’, and instead choose to communicate like an unlobotomised person, you’ll find yourself a virtual pariah.
But there’s a problem with this terminology, and it’s not just that it makes you sound like an utter bellend. As any fan of Orwell will tell you, ‘If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.’ All manner of sins, from ignorance to unclear leadership, can be covered by muddy and metaphorical Business-ese. The way we speak seeps into our values, mindset and priorities. So it’s troubling to find, if you take the time to examine modern work-twaddle phrase by phrase, how deeply dehumanising this modern dialect can be.
Take my personal bête noire, the word ‘bandwidth’. It originally referred to segments along the electromagnetic spectrum in radio, TV and later the web — dreary technical stuff, you’ll agree. Nowadays you’ll hear the term used by frazzled colleagues in between endless streams of Zoom calls, and fired at you personally: ‘Hey Dan, do you have bandwidth to take on a new deadline?’ In the past, we would say ‘Do you have time; do you have the energy’. No longer.
Bandwidth is troubling, because it’s just one of many phrases that assume we are mere cogs in the machine. Or worse, machines ourselves. And it’s the tip of the enterprise iceberg in terms of language portraying workers as resources to max out. As all too many of us know, when you run out of ‘bandwidth’ you ‘burn out’, like an old fuse. You ‘go offline’, unable to be ‘pinged’ for yet another task. Is it any wonder a global report released by Gallup last year found that British workers were ‘among the saddest, loneliest and most disengaged in Europe’?
Nor is this epidemic confined to the King’s English. Chat to your colleague in Frankfurt about a project, and Helmut will likely reply ‘Ja, hab’ ich auf dem Schirm’, or ‘It’s on my screen’, meaning the task is on track and nicht forgotten. Even the supposedly warm-blooded Spaniards will hunt for ‘sinergia para optimizar la precisión’. It’s not enough that technology infiltrates our every task; it has now wormed its way into each Slack convo or Teams call, and roped us into its bloodless, closed-loop system. Some people might paint this as a benign evolution in communication. But I can’t be the only one who thinks this insidious software-based slang, used every day, rather ekes away at the soul.
So as summer dwindles away and millions of salarymen and -women trudge back to work, it’s high time for a bracing reset. To remind ourselves that, in fact, we’re not robots. (Incidentally, did you know ‘robot’ comes from the Czech word for ‘forced labor’ or ‘slave’?) The good news, particularly for the one in four British workers who say their job makes them deeply unhappy, is that change is possible. We can crib a line from the patron saint of corporate rebels, Melville’s Bartleby, and say ‘I would prefer not to’. Try it: tell Angela in marketing that, ‘Per my last email,’ you will not ‘touch base’ with the ‘hackathon’ to ‘debug our operations with 2.0 thinking’ .
So when your boss asks you to ‘double-click to give me the full data dump’ — an actual phrase I’ve heard in the wild — you can, gently but firmly, reply ‘Do you mean “explain my goals in detail”?’ (While you’re at it, maybe add that the term ‘data dump’ has troubling faecal undertones.)
If we can start talking like card-carrying people again, Orwell would say, we can feel that little bit less like droids in dress shoes. By reclaiming our language and going back to queries like ‘are you free?’ instead of ‘got bandwidth for…?’ we improve both our culture and collective IQ. I’m backed by research here: cognitive psychologists at Cornell University found that workers who regularly use corporate twaddle are less likely to be good at their jobs.
As Dr Litrell, who led the study, explained, his method was simple. He built an algorithm that would create sentences based on real-sounding buzzwords. ‘On about 1,000 different workers, I basically just tested to see whether or not they could tell the difference between real language — ’cause I used real statements [from Fortune 500 leaders] as well — versus these absurd, like, nonsensical statements,’ Litrell said in an interview. Respondents were then tested on their analytical capabilities. People that buy into executive jargon the most, he noted ‘tend to also struggle with decision-making in the workplace.’
What’s eerie is how much Litrell’s fake, nonsensical conglomo-drivel looked like it was plucked directly from email chains I’ve endured. How many of us, after all, have been told by grinning higher-ups that ‘we will actualise a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing’, crafting ‘a hyper-connected, frictionless, and impact-minded global enterprise’? Confronted by such emails, Orwell would tut his head and say that Big Brother’s Newspeak was well and truly here. Then he’d brew up a tea, sigh, and remind us that step one to sounding smart is sounding human.
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