Tuesday, November 3, 2015

My tongue would get a hernia.

Maybe it's a function of my advanced age.

But I'll admit.

In nine meetings out of 10, I have no idea what anyone's saying.

Viktor Klemperer, living in a "Jew's House" in Dresden during World War II, called the invasion of Nazi semantics, Lingua Tertii Imperii--the language of the Third Reich.

I'm afraid we have created our own pernicious language.

A language that elicits nods of understanding due to familiarity, but that is still devoid of meaning.

This is the discourse of buzzwords and bushwa.

And it has taken over.

We talk, seriously, of 'high-level strategic roadmaps.'

We iterate.

We engage in actioning.

We contextualize and unpack connective tissue while deconstructing our use-cases as they funnel through the pipeline on their way to KPIs.

Fuck a duck.

If I tried to speak like this, my tongue would get a hernia.

Or sue me for abuse.

I understand that carpenters have their language. Lawyers, theirs. I know Air Force personnel call 5-52s BUFFs. Big Ugly Fat Fuckers.

But we are in the communications business.

We are in the business of precise words.

This stakeholder is having difficulty making a pivot into this brave new whitespace.

No comments: