The joy of officespeak

Many writers decry office-speak such as “going forward” or “step up to the plate” as “useless” or “irritating”. Let’s celebrate it instead. There are many uses for office-speak, or biz-speak, or buzzwords.

“Going forward” has especially come in for criticism as a kind of nervous tick in business speech, a filler phrase without any meaning or sense. A typical phrase would be: “Going forward, our results will be better next year.”

But look, there’s no need to push the envelope here: At the end of the day, as long as we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet and are on the same page, we can pick the low-hanging fruit for some quick wins and put this one to bed.

Using the phrase “going forward” immediately stamps you as a serious businessperson. It’s like wearing a suit and tie. If you said, “Like, our results will be better next year, dudes,” people would look askance at you, even though it’s the same thing.
Similarly, if you say, “We need to be creative in our thinking to solve this problem,” you might be mistaken for an artist or an academic. Not so if you use the phrase, “We need to think out of the box here.” (If you say it in Afrikaans you may be removed from the room, however).

The really useful buzzwords negate the necessity of thought, and more importantly avoid the dangers inherent in actually saying something meaningful. Put them together like pieces of Lego and you can create whole sentences and paragraphs without imparting any real information. This is particularly useful in official writing, such as in the chairman’s statement in the annual report, or a press release about layoffs.

Occasionally we will be startled by an actual opinion in the chairman’s statement. But the chairman’s statement is really just there with a lot of other stuff, like the CEO’s report, for padding around the figures and to reassure investors that someone is steering the ship. The figures themselves sometimes show whether the ship is heading for an iceberg.

Statements like, “We have been, and will continue to be, focused on adding value for shareholders,” are mildly soothing, like the familiar scent given off by office photocopiers. That it’s meaningless is no matter. It shows that the person writing the phrase is conscious of the need to “add value” (a high-sounding idea), is aware the company has shareholders and is safely boring. No chance this man (it almost always is) will risk the company’s future on a matter of principle or break ranks with other companies in the industry.

And let’s not forget the utility to the user of buzzwords and officespeak. Spewing buzzwords is no hindrance to promotion. Rather the opposite. I’ve known buskers to get to stratospheric heights on the hot air they’ve generated.

Don’t confuse office-speak with jargon, however.

A writer for a Sunday newspaper recently complained that his interviewee, the acting head of the Post Office, had deflected his questions about the unacceptable level of theft at the organisation with “jargon” such as “holistic”. But when she said that the matter should be looked at holistically, she was using officespeak, not jargon, as her shield against the media.

Jargon has a purpose as a kind of shorthand between professionals. When two people deeply involved in market trading meet and talk about contangos, they both know what they mean and it doesn’t matter that no one else does. The origin of jargon lies in technical terms invented to explain complex phenomena.

Jargon, though, also has a purpose as an obfuscatory mechanism (how’s that for a bit of sesquispedality?).

The following is jargon, reproduced by an IT journalist: “Value-added network service providers (VANS) wanting to self-provide national backhaul networks through an individual electronic communications network service (I-ECNS) licence face the same financial and social obligations as major telecoms operators.” I am unable to translate it. It might as well be Mandarin to me.

So give me officespeak any day, however sinister you may feel its search for new euphemisms for firing people (restructure, downsize), however quaintly it avoids “problems” and replaces them with “challenges,” however idiotic the idea of “forward planning” may strike you.

Spare a thought for the baseball-loving executives having to “step up to the plate” to endure endless flights with their laptops balanced on their knees, preparing Powerpoint presentations no one will love, but all will accept, simply because they are chock-full of the clichés that make office life so amusing.