James Gingell leans in to note that management jargon has evolved into an everyday workplace dialect full of bullshit like "deliverables," "upskill," "learnings," "drill-down," "value-add," "moving forward," "enablers and barriers," and "quick wins."
He wonders: perhaps this pidgin terminology is filling a legitimate language vacuum?
This isn't a satisfactory explanation at all. Language is the means by which the pinball thoughts we have bouncing around our heads are ordered, arranged and deposited into the minds of others. And by this definition, office-speak is not a language or even a pidgin; it's essentially an anti-language. …
I think it helps to think of office-speak as a meme. In the true sense of the word (first described by genius biologist / idiot theologian Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene), memes are the "genes of culture", powerful concepts passed between our minds and down through generations, broadly staying the same, but subtly changing and evolving in response to the shifting sands of the cultural milieu.
This helps illustrate what's really changed: the fading of our mental shields, our resistance to it. Gingell focuses on office-speak's status as a numbing form of management control, and how it feeds the promotion ecology of dysfunctional businesses.
But it serves another purpose for workers, too, which gives it memetic fuel: it helps us insulate ourselves from workplace alienation by giving that alienation its own language, so that we do not confuse the real language of our lives with the language of our work.
Counterproductive, obviously!
