Some Venting About Corpo-speak
Fair warning: this post doesn’t really have any technical, aesthetic, or argumentative merit. I just wanted to complain, and complaining in an ostensibly public place does actually work better than the “write it and throw it away” crowd may think.
There are certain phrases that, for reasons I will attempt (and likely fail) to touch on, I find disproportionately, perhaps unreasonably, obnoxious. These excretions are the textual – and really unfortunately, sometimes verbal – equivalent of Corporate Memphis, both blandly generic and carefully obscure.
- Thanks in advance or *shudder* TIA. Like tipping before service is rendered, this phrase has disconnected the acknowledgement from its purpose, making it even more perfunctory than it already was while attempting to pre-emptively excuse yourself when you disrespectfully forget to acknowledge the work that someone has done in response to your ask.
- Ask. While taking pains to point out that I will avoid the prescriptivist “it’s not a noun” argument, I will say that it still grates in an aesthetic sense. Functionally, it is less precise than several other common words – question, request, demand – which means that it fails miserably on the grounds of being jargon. What is its purpose? To save one syllable so your recipient has to read between the lines to understand the nature and severity of the thing being asked?
- Action. How about just… do?
- Context in some… contexts. What’s wrong with “information”? Using “context” where it means “information” makes it sounds like you don’t know what the word means but you want to sound smart, while eroding the usefully unique applications of the word in cases where it does not simply mean “information”.
- Logo as synecdoche for “company/organization”. I’m not typically one to defend corporations, but there’s something reductively selfish about calling a paying customer, even a heartless megacorporation, a “logo”. Like they are stickers to collect on your water bottle before you forget about them and move onto the next one. Wait, they’re paying customers with legitimate requests and complaints? Sorry, I can’t hear you over my slides full of logos.
- Infinite runway. Normal people not in the big tech cult would call this “profitability” because, as it turns out, normal businesses need to turn a profit to stick around instead of indefinitely suckling at the teat of venture capitalists. If it’s not profitability, why are you trying to trick me into thinking it is?
- Reach out. You’re reaching out, but by using this phrase, you’re paradoxically keeping the target at arm’s length. I find this phrase excusable in a corporate context for that reason, but when it leaks into casual speech, I squash it. Your relationship with the reach-out-ee is better described with something like “talk to”, “call”, “text”, “email”, “ask”, “tell”, “request”, “plead” or “yell at”, meaning, as with ask, this phrase fails at jargon and makes your recipient do some guesswork.
- Warm regards. Pronounced “tepid acknowledgement”, this oddly specific pairing of words is more common than it should be. Just say “thank you” or “see you soon” or literally any other stock phrase that reflects the nature of the preceding message. Emails – which are the environment where this phrase evolved and the only one it continues to inhabit – are not generally “warm”, especially not if your current relationship with the recipient is one where you think this phrase might apply. Don’t make it weird.
Now on the other hand, there’s at least one corporate phrase I love to use:
- Shareholder value, which can be used to explain everything.