Why is office talk full of sporty verbs when our lives are more sedentary than ever?
Idea
“Have you ever noticed that some people always jump?” asked Christine Cemm via email. “I hop online. I hop into a meeting. I hop on Zoom. I hop on the highway to avoid rush hour traffic. And my sister says she hops in the shower before going out.”
Christine was onto something. More evidence emerges in media archives. a business guru Australian Financial Review He warns companies not to “jump too quickly into AI”, just as start-ups have jumped into the share market or mining giants have jumped into ROI (Return on Investment). Meanwhile, US tennis star Amanda Anisimova likes to “take an ice bath before hitting the court”.
Athletes are, of course, expected to be more agile than investors jumping on the bandwagon or job seekers jumping on Seek. Unless house prices and flu cases are rising, Monash Uni is beating a dozen rival campuses in the best overall list.
As Christine points out, this trend is exhausting: “Do all these jumps show some enthusiasm or intention that I’m missing?” Tough. On the contrary, such an active style is camouflage, a callisthenic dialect that adds a false gloss to the dull truth of the message. Same thing with helplines that tell you to go online and enter your information; This implies a game of elasticity rather than bureaucratic servitude.
Business language loves such acrobatic phrases. Follow the usage of “pivot” in recent years and you’ll imagine life is more of a basketball game than a bottomless inbox. Just like 2018’s Thai cave rescuers Richard Harris and Craig Challen are the only ones qualified to talk about deep diving.
I call these playground verbs; It’s a sneaky way to invoke the purer games of old, when tagging meant chasing friends rather than chasing ass for e-Tag refunds. It is also ironic that the rise of pleasurable acts contrasts with our increasing lethargy. A recent survey conducted by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (look, it’s impossible to avoid) shows that nearly 70 per cent of adults are failing to meet physical activity guidelines. Just as screen time among children is rapidly increasing.
Other research has found that the more managers abuse all these little verbs, the more we hate them. Cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell of Cornell University reflects this mindset in his latest article: Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale: Development, validation, and relationships with workplace outcomes.. Littrell isolates hated terms like lanes, milestones, turnarounds, and roadmaps as if office life were now a triathlon.
Speaking on National Public Radio, Littrell said, “When people want to impress their colleagues, they use language that is heavy on trendy jargon. Or they are trying to climb the corporate ladder faster.”
Then there is the smokescreen effect. When their core message is an abstract mess, leaders will resort to metaphors like jumping and unpacking, levering and moving forward, while turning to vivid verbs as if their calls to action were as innocent as hopscotch at noon.
Littrell again: “So if a message sounds smart or impressive but you can’t explain what evidence would support it, you’re probably more impressed by the packaging of the message than its actual content.” In other words, absolute return. Just like in our childhood, in our real running-jumping days, we would spin around the intersections of playgrounds for dizzying fun.
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David Astle is the crossword compiler and Wordplay columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. ABC Radio is the broadcaster in Melbourne.
