The Dialect of the Chosen

My tie is strangling me, or maybe it’s just the recycled air in this 41st-floor boardroom that tastes like carpet cleaner and expensive regret. I’m staring at a smudge on the mahogany table that looks suspiciously like a thumbprint from 1991, while Marcus-our Senior VP of Global Optimization-is currently vibrating with the kind of intensity usually reserved for cult leaders or people who have just discovered crossfit. He leans forward, his cufflinks clicking against the wood like a 1-second warning.

“The reality is simple,” Marcus says, though it never is. “We need to leverage our core competencies to operationalize a paradigm shift and scale our value-add across the entire vertical ecosystem. If we don’t capture this synergy now, our friction-less transition will become a legacy bottleneck.”

If you can’t define what someone is saying, you can’t hold them accountable for failing to do it. You can’t fire a man for failing to ‘operationalize a paradigm shift’ because no one has ever successfully defined what that looks like in a 40-hour work week.

Clarity: The Union Negotiator’s Weapon

Daniel V.K. understands this better than most. Daniel is a union negotiator who has spent the last 21 years across the table from men like Marcus. He’s the kind of guy who wears a short-sleeved button-down and carries a notepad that has seen more conflict than a peace treaty. I remember sitting in on a session where the corporate side tried to explain that they weren’t ‘cutting staff’ but were instead ‘re-imagining the human capital architecture to prioritize lean agility.’

Daniel didn’t nod. He didn’t even blink. He waited for exactly 11 seconds-I timed it on my watch-and then leaned into his microphone. ‘Are you firing 51 people or 61 people?’ he asked. The corporate lawyer stuttered, tried to go back to the ‘human capital architecture’ script, and Daniel cut him off again. ‘I don’t speak Cloud. I speak Rent and Groceries. Give me a number that doesn’t have a cape on it.’

The Treadmill of Abstraction

I find myself doing it too, which is the worst part. Yesterday, I told my wife that we needed to ‘optimize our domestic logistics’ when I really just meant we needed to stop buying so much milk that expires before we drink it. I felt the words leave my mouth and I wanted to pull them back in, but they were already out there, hovering in the kitchen like a bad smell. I’m part of the problem. We all are. We’ve been conditioned to believe that ‘synergy’ sounds more professional than ‘working together,’ even though the former makes you sound like a sentient LinkedIn post.

It’s the same thing. She wasn’t talking to me; she was protecting herself with a shield of ‘policy migration.’ If she said ‘I can’t help you because I’m afraid I’ll get in trouble,’ we would be having a human conversation. Instead, we were two actors reading from a script written by someone who hasn’t stood behind a counter in 31 years. It’s exhausting.

The Illusion of Infinite Success

This linguistic fog allows for a complete lack of accountability. If no one is saying anything specific, no one can be proven wrong. It’s the language of people who are terrified of making a clear, falsifiable statement. If Marcus says we will ‘increase revenue by 11 percent by December 1st,’ and we don’t, he has failed. But if he says we will ‘continue to aggressively pursue market-leading growth through strategic alignment,’ he can never fail.

There is a profound beauty in being direct. It’s why people gravitate toward things that don’t try to hide behind a curtain of marketing-speak. This is particularly true in industries that are notoriously opaque. When you look at health, wellness, or even simple commerce, the brands that stand out are the ones that drop the act. For instance, when looking for transparency in a world of ‘proprietary blends’ and ‘bio-optimized formulas,’ finding something like Lipoless is a relief because it implies a focus on the result rather than the fluff.

I would estimate that 81 percent of them contained at least one sentence that meant absolutely nothing. ‘Checking in to see if we can touch base on the deliverables for the cross-functional deep dive.’ Translation: ‘Did you do the thing?’

The Breath of Life

I’m sitting here now, writing this on a Tuesday afternoon. I have 11 windows open on my computer. One of them is a spreadsheet titled ‘Strategic Scalability.’ I think I’m going to rename it ‘Stuff We Need to Do.’ It feels like a small rebellion, like returning that espresso machine without the receipt and refusing to leave until someone talks to me like a person.

The death of the sentence is the birth of the bureaucrat.

– The New Reality

We are drowning in a sea of $51 words while our $1 problems go unsolved. We scale, we pivot, we disrupt, and we innovate, yet we can’t seem to write an email that doesn’t require a decoder ring.

I eventually got my store credit for that espresso machine, by the way. It took 31 minutes and a conversation with a manager who looked like he hadn’t slept since 2011. He didn’t use any jargon. He just looked at the broken plastic, looked at me, and said, ‘Yeah, that’s a piece of junk. Let’s get you a new one.’