The past few years have seen a slew of devastating style assaults on the English language known as “LinkedIn speak.” You know the type of word salad: “synergize” instead of “combine,” “ideated” instead of “thought of,” “holistic” instead of – well – looking at something as a whole. Alarmingly, there is now an app, Kagi Translate, that allows you to type any sentence and it will deliver it for you in this wretched patois. For instance, write “I went to the zoo,” and Kagi gives you: “I had an incredible opportunity to observe high-performing teams in a diverse ecosystem and reflect on the importance of adaptability and strategic positioning.” Go on, try it. Or rather: “Step out of your comfort zone and embrace the growth mindset – give it a shot and see where the journey takes you.”
A particularly awful tendency of this miserable vernacular is to eschew perfectly functional and effective nouns, or rather not eschew but sweat them and really make them sing for their supper. Why limit yourself to being one part of speech when you can be two? Anyone who has worked in an office or who has surveyed the grim linguistic landscape of LinkedIn – as nightmarish and barren a wasteland as Otto Dix could conjure up – will be familiar with the horrible phrases “diarize” (put a meeting in the diary), the even worse “calendarize” and “credentialize” (do something which will burnish your reputation). Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, writers of the HBO show Industry and brilliant observers of workplace language and mores, note this trend in the latest series. When Yasmin Muck (Marisa Abela) says that a launch for a business should be “eventized,” Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella) wails: “We gotta stop using the word eventize like it’s a serious word.”
What’s behind it all? I think it’s a move by people in the white-collar workplace, who are constantly being told that they should be suffering from imposter syndrome, to seem more active than they are and to have more agency than they really do. It’s a carapace that is put on to make you seem unassailably active and energetic and to pronounce that nothing in your environment happens without you as its catalyst. It’s a departure from Orwell’s famous instruction to “never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” In this case adding “-ize” to nouns steers away from clear, robust Anglo-Saxon English and towards Latin and Greek-derived words, which we tend to use for science and process. It’s the language, as it were, of the textbook as opposed to the language of the touchline.
In this respect it’s an extension of the manager-speak that has cropped up all over the place, from redundancy notices in financial firms to judicial inquiries, the rich lush rainforest of the English language now just vast fields of palm tree pabulum. And this matters because the more opaque and blander you make your language, the less clear and more confusing it becomes. Clarity is surely the great totem of communication but everything in our current professional and political landscape is moving towards obfuscation and boredom (I have a theory that there has never been an interesting paragraph that includes the word “stakeholder,” for example).
There has never been an interesting paragraph that includes the word stakeholder
This case of verbs taking on more than they were ever meant to is also there in perhaps the most egregious of the barbarities heaped on the English language – the supersession of the perfectly useful and inoffensive word “lessons” with “learnings.” You see it everywhere: “What were the learnings from that?”; “For myself, I have to say that I’ve experienced some major learnings recently”; “Learnings included the following”… on and on it goes. In none of these contexts would “lessons” be out of place and yet it is being remorselessly squeezed out, again because using “learning” makes the whole thing seem more active, more indicative of a process, of you being constantly on, constantly moving, constantly catalyzing. I haven’t seen it yet, but we can’t be far off having “lesson” itself mutated and mutilated like this, with someone writing or saying in all seriousness that they have “lessoned the learnings” from something instead of learning the lessons.
To return to Orwell, not only the great sentinel over linguistic aesthetics, but also the Cassandra or Laocoon of how language can be abused and appropriated for nefarious ends, let us adapt the last sentence of Animal Farm: “The creatures outside looked from verb to noun, and from noun to verb, and from verb to noun again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
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