Why Business Jargon Isn’t All Bad

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 5 February 2019

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Anne Curzan, English professor at the University of Michigan, studies the evolution of language. While many of us roll our eyes at bizspeak — from synergy to value-add to operationalize — Curzan defends business jargon. She says the words we say around the office speak volumes about our organizations and our working relationships. She shares how to use jargon more deliberately, explains the origin of some annoying or amusing buzzwords, and discusses how English became the global business language and how that could change.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone it's Kurt we need your help with our annual survey this is your last chance to help us get to know you so we can make idea cast even better for you
0:09.8	it's easy just go to HBR.org
0:13.0	podcast survey.
0:15.0	Again, that's HBR.org.
0:17.0	And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBRIDIA cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish. Do you architect end to end synergies by operationalizing outside the box iterations?
0:55.0	Are your emails filled with drilling down, touching base, and moving needles?
1:00.0	Is it your MO to sling ROI and B2B at the water cooler?
1:04.0	Or are you the sort of person who finds business jargon annoying?
1:07.9	Either way, this episode is for you.
1:11.0	Like it or not, business language is a reality. And today we're going to talk about where
1:15.6	these buzzwords come from, what purpose they serve, and their unintended consequences.
1:21.1	Here to talk about this, and also about how English is evolving as the global business language is Anne Curzan.
1:27.0	She's a professor of English at the University of Michigan and an author of several books on language her latest is fixing English
1:34.9	and thanks so much for joining us. My pleasure. Let's just start with the basics. To you when you hear the term business language, what does that mean?
1:54.0	Like how is business language different and how should we be thinking about it differently
1:57.9	than kind of everyday language?
2:01.0	When you say business language to me, the first word that comes to mind is jargon and I don't
2:07.4	use that in as negative a sense as many people use it as a linguist I think about jargon as the words or the lexicon that is specific to a profession
2:20.0	or a pastime and we know that when groups of people get together and are involved in a shared
2:27.1	enterprise that they will often create and use a set of specialized terms.
2:34.0	That kind of language can provide you with useful shortcuts.
2:38.0	It also can create a sense of insiders and outsiders.
	...

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