The Cadence of Evasion

The cursor is blinking with a rhythmic, taunting cadence, 124 times per minute, while I stare at the ‘Send’ button on a reply I know is a lie. I am about to tell a colleague that I have the ‘bandwidth’ to ‘socialize’ their ‘deliverable’ by ‘close of play.’ My stomach is doing that slow, sour turn it does when I know I’ve abandoned actual English for the sake of a quiet life. This email is the byproduct of a 24-minute conversation I just spent trying to end politely. Every time I reached for a conclusion, the other person would launch into a new ‘value-added’ thought-stream, effectively trapping me in a linguistic cage of their own making. I realized halfway through that we weren’t actually communicating; we were just exchanging counters in a game where the winner is the person who says the most without committing to a single, falsifiable fact.

The Sound of Regretful Walking

My friend Ruby J.-P. is a foley artist, which is perhaps the most honest profession left on the planet. Her entire life is dedicated to the relationship between an action and its sound. When she needs the sound of a bone breaking, she doesn’t ‘leverage an organic auditory asset’; she breaks a piece of celery into a condenser microphone. She told me once, while she was sorting through 154 different types of gravel to find the ‘sound of regretful walking,’ that the corporate world confuses her because of its lack of texture. She’ll get notes from producers who say the sound needs to be more ‘synergistic’ or ‘innovative.’ She usually just stares at them until they describe a physical sensation. ‘Tell me if it’s wet or dry,’ she’ll say. ‘Tell me if it’s heavy or light. I can’t record “synergy.”‘

The Suit of Words

I’ve caught myself doing it, too. I’ll spend 44 minutes drafting a memo about ‘process optimization’ when what I really mean is ‘we’re doing this wrong and it’s making everyone miserable.’ I use the jargon because it feels safe. It feels professional. It feels like I’m wearing a suit made of words. But the suit is suffocating. When we stop using direct language, we stop being able to think clearly. If you can’t describe a problem in plain English, you probably don’t understand the problem. You certainly don’t have a solution. You just have a collection of buzzwords that sound like a solution if you say them fast enough while showing a PowerPoint slide with 4 different shades of blue.

The Uncomfortable Clarity

I think back to Ruby J.-P. and her gravel. She knows that the sound of a boot on stone is different from the sound of a boot on dirt. The specificity is what makes the scene feel real. In our work, the specificity is what makes the project feel meaningful. When we lose the ability to name our actions specifically, we lose the sense of purpose behind them. Why are we here? Are we here to ‘drive impact’ or are we here to build something that helps someone? The former sounds better in a performance review, but the latter is what keeps you from wanting to scream into your 4-dollar coffee every Tuesday morning.

I’ve started trying to implement a ‘Plain English’ policy in my own life. It’s harder than it looks. I’ve found that I rely on jargon more than I’d like to admit. It’s a shortcut. It’s a way to avoid the vulnerability of being wrong. If I say I’m ‘evaluating the feasibility,’ and it fails, I was just doing my job. If I say ‘I’m trying to see if this works,’ and it fails, I’ve failed. But I’d rather fail honestly than succeed in a way that I can’t even explain to my mother. It’s about reclaiming the agency that language is supposed to give us.

Glossy Brochure vs. Messy Reality

In some ways, our obsession with corporate-speak is a mirror of our digital consumption habits. We crave the high-gloss, the polished, and the manufactured. We see this in how we consume media, where everything is curated to the point of exhaustion. Even in niche subcultures, like those found around

KPOP2, there is a tension between the highly produced ‘perfect’ image and the raw talent beneath it. The corporate world has chosen the ‘produced’ over the ‘raw’ every single time. We have opted for the glossy brochure over the messy reality. But the messy reality is where the work actually happens. The messy reality is where Ruby J.-P. finds the perfect sound for a heartbeat by thumping a wet rag against a wooden board.

I wonder if we’ll ever reach a breaking point. Maybe we’ll reach a level of ‘synergy’ so profound that the words will simply cease to have any vowels at all, and we’ll just communicate in a series of clicks and whistles like some hyper-capitalist dolphin species. Or maybe, just maybe, we’ll get tired of it. We’ll realize that the 444 emails we send every week are mostly noise. We’ll realize that we’re wasting our lives translating our thoughts into a language that no one actually speaks.

The Smallest Shift

I finally hit ‘Send’ on that email. But before I did, I deleted the word ‘bandwidth’ and replaced it with ‘time.’ I deleted ‘socialize’ and replaced it with ‘talk about.’ I deleted ‘deliverable’ and replaced it with ‘the report.’ It felt small. It felt insignificant.

It wasn’t a ‘paradigm shift.’ It was just a sentence. And sometimes, a sentence is enough.

The Sound of Truth

We could all stand to do a little more of that, provided we can find the words to describe what we’re hearing without checking the corporate handbook first.