Sticking it to the language

The changing of words for no particular reason, whether they need it or not, is nothing new.

Nero Wolfe’s abhorrence “to contact” as a verb was memorable. Although I haven’t reread the books in thirty or forty years, I haven’t forgotten his opinion: pfui. Yet I contact people all the time and have no problem with it. On the other hand, I do not gift anyone with flowers, a book, or a second chance. Giving it is good enough for me. Nor do I task anyone with a job. I can assign it, or I can tell or ask someone to do it. In historical fiction, a duchess can order a footman to close the curtains. A general can order an army to besiege a city. The footman need not be tasked with the chore nor the army with the siege.

Twenty-first century corporate speak does worse than turn nouns into verbs and festoon them with prepositions. It replaces clear communication with obfuscatory language. If its objective is to impress, it fails; if to confuse and deceive, it succeeds.

Take “stakeholders.” I first heard the term when my husband, who worked for many years at a university, saw it in an email from his new boss, who came to academia from the corporate world. Stakeholders? He was baffled. Were stakeholders the university employees, who keep the university running? the faculty, who he had anecdotes galore to demonstrate are perennially shocked to hear they are employees? the board of trustees, who eventually made all the decisions that transformed the university into an entity indistinguishable from a corporation? the students, whose tuition fees pay the bills? the alumni, whose donations cover the deficit and pay for capital expansion?

Then there’s “leverage.” My favorite example comes from an email from my billionaire landlord, telling the tenants that our building had a new super.

“Resident-manager responsibilities will be supported by Resident Manager Luis Y., who has been with [the landlord] for more than 20 years. Leveraging his deep operational expertise and steadfast commitment to customer service, Luis will guide day-to-day operations and strategic initiatives.”

Huh? Why didn’t they fire the corporate team they paid the big bucks to streamline operations and pay me to write that email? I would have said, “The new super brings more than 20 years of experience and competence to the job.”

I’ve spoken fluent French since spending two years in the Peace Corps in post-colonial French-speaking West Africa. In the 1960s, the French were still quite a presence. They called white-collar and educated Africans, including the country’s impressive President, evolués. When I returned for a visit in the 1980s, evolué had become intellectuel, obviously a concession to political correctness, which has been around for a while. As I keep telling you, kids, politically correct and incorrect were invented by Stalin, that other great dictator whose admirers on the American left were shocked to learn he’d killed 38 million people. But ah, the French! I like their 21st century words better than ours: They run to political terms like verdissement or écoblanchiment d’image (greenwashing your public image as a marketing ploy) and wokisme. Rather than becoming more wordy and obscure, they’ve shortened things, not just a few like our “vacay” (who actually says “vacay?”) but a lot, including ado for teenager, mat for morning (matin), comme d’hab for as usual (comme d’habitude). And the new slang is verlan, words in reverse (l’envers). They no longer cherchez la femme, she’s la meuf. If someone’s shady, they’re not louche, they’re chelou. If life gets heavy, it’s not lourd, it’s relou. It’s crazy (fou)! Or as they say, C’est ouf!

My granddaughter onboarding on
the couch on her first day at work

I wish American corporate speak were that much fun. Take “onboarding,” the new term for starting a job. Neither of my granddaughters went to the office on their first day at work. They were, yep, tasked with “onboarding” remotely. Back in the Neolithic, it was fun to go to work on the first day of a new job, now called a “role.” You took your first step into a whole new world. You met people who would be your colleagues. Some might become your friends.

As for onboarding, we used to call it orientation. Getting oriented means something: finding your place within a complex system, your place of employment, with its physical, social, and hierarchical structure and division of labor. “Onboarding” is an awkward term, compounded of a preposition and a gerund, that doesn’t mean much of anything.

In an email from the ever trendy Museum of Modern Art in New York, the MoMA Design Store announced, “We are sunsetting our rewards program.” Please! MoMA patrons are smart enough to get that it's bad news, however euphemized.

It’s not so much the particular examples. It’s the ruthless torture of the English language that gets to me. Turning a noun into a verb instead of using a perfectly good verb that already exists is like cutting off an arm and a leg, throwing away the arm, and sticking the leg on the shoulder. I wish they’d stop doing it. But they won’t.

What are your least favorite examples? Which do you find yourself giving in and using?