This week, I read George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” In this essay, Orwell argues that lazy and imprecise language is both a symptom and a cause of political corruption, with political rhetoric often used to obscure truth through euphemism and vagueness. Nearly 80 years have passed since Orwell wrote this essay, and somehow, nothing’s changed. We failed to “move the needle.” If you work in a corporate job, you can probably guess where I’m going with this. I have been working in a corporate job for nearly eight years now, and as time went by, I started to notice how our collective language changed. All of a sudden, we were scheduling “touch-bases,” we were going after “low-hanging fruits,” “closing loops” and “leveraging resources” to “break down silos.” Big yikes. Honestly, how did we get here? Why do we use so much corporate jargon, and how did it spread so fast? What does it really say about us, and what does it hide? For us, this is new, but the dynamics at play are beyond ancient.
Already in the 5th and 4th century BC, the Sophists, traveling teachers in Ancient Greece, were known for being highly skilled with words, particularly with the aim to win arguments in the courts and political assemblies. Essentially, they’re the ancestors of Saul Goodman. Their focus was often on winning the argument and persuading the audience, regardless of the objective truth. Protagoras, a famous Sophist, was known for the dictum, “Man is the measure of all things,” suggesting a relativistic view where objective truth is secondary to what one can successfully argue for. In other terms, “Everything is relative.” Socrates and his student, Plato, saw this style of teaching as dangerous and deceitful, and argued that Sophistic rhetoric was concerned with appearance over reality, and opinion over knowledge.
Corporate English is similar to Sophistic rhetoric in the way that it often confuses people unfamiliar with it, and can be “leveraged” for strategic gains, mainly by deceiving interlocutors through vague yet verbose discourse. Take the recent return-to-office (RTO) mandates for instance. In internal corporate communications and company town halls, RTOs are often promoted as strategic executive decisions to foster employee collaboration, encourage synchronous teamwork, and are sometimes even presented as a way to palliate workers’ “loneliness,” with seasonal in-office initiatives such as pumpkin-carving contests in October and Secret Santa in December.
However, the context in which decisions are made is often as telling as the decisions themselves. For the case of RTOs, the context surrounding them is, currently, one highly influenced by recessionary markets, economic anxiety and cautious consumer behavior. For the average Joe, that means struggling to make ends meet because of a rise in the cost of living and a stagnating salary. For the average CEO, it means having to talk the board into yet another round of investment. Either way, the volatility of our external environment is making all of us sweat. We’re losing control. We simply can’t predict what tomorrow is going to be made of, and it’s changing the ways in which we behave. RTOs, in this context, can be seen as a “recession indicator.” When we start to lose control, we try to get it back—somewhere, anywhere. Reclaiming control over work, for the corporate elite calling the shots on office dynamics, can mean tightening the grip over the ants nest, ensuring workers and their performance are measurable and reportable to the board. It’s a way to exercise control not necessarily over the areas where we previously lost control, but over any area that will enable us to feel like we’re “taking action,” and above all, a way to convey that image externally.
Meanwhile, we’re entering the back half of the 2020s, we have more technological resources than we can think of, and every possible Microsoft tool to communicate, praise each other, provide feedback, and brainstorm in both synchronous and asynchronous ways, but despite all these technological advancements, somehow, the rhetoric that “nothing beats in-person teamwork” does not seem to go away.
So, it doesn’t really add up, and that’s my very point here. Despite being promoted as positive (paramount, almost) corporate initiatives, allegedly benefiting both productivity and employee engagement, RTO mandates seem to yield the opposite outcome. Already in December 2023, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh focused on a sample of companies from the S&P 500 Index that publicly announced RTO mandates, and found that RTO mandates in fact caused significant declines in employees’ job satisfaction and did not cause any significant changes in financial performance or firm values. This reinforces the possibility of other factors (besides the great joys of in-person collaboration) driving RTO mandates—starting with the likeliest ones: economic anxiety and its subsequent unconscious emotional displacement. The language surrounding these mandates, all the collaboration-synergy-innovation fluff, is part of the very mechanism used to mask their real drivers.
Granted, I got a bit sidetracked there, but you get the idea: on planet Corporate as much as anywhere else, things aren’t always how they seem, and even less how they sound. Corporate English is to the shaping of office dynamics what circumspect discourse is to politics: by using vague language and cryptic idioms, one’s promises, though well-packaged on the outside, remain blurry and intangible at core. In even simpler terms, unclear commitments bear unclear outcomes.
Orwell describes this dynamic with precision in his 1946 essay on the English language and its use in politics, explaining that the use of vague, pretentious, and incomprehensible language is a tool for concealing the truth, and that the use of poor discourse corrupts thought. “Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness,” he writes. This type of language bears an impact on both the speaker as much as the listener. For the speaker who relies on a collection of meaningless words and worn-out phrases, their own speech renders them into unconscious word machines, mechanically repeating familiar expressions. For the listener, Orwell states that, on one hand, vague language manipulates the audience’s perception, making listeners less likely to question or reject the underlying dishonesty of policies discussed, while on the other hand, the use of poor language can spread like a contagion to the general public, further perpetuating the decline of the language itself. This could not be more true in the case of Corporate English, and that’s precisely where some even more interesting dynamics are at play.
When we mechanically use expressions like “getting our ducks in a row,” when we talk about “synergies” and “ecosystems,” refer to simple content as “assets,” or request a work item to be done by “EOD,” what we’re unconsciously doing isn’t merely communicating, but signaling our belonging to a tribe through language. We’re essentially saying “I’ve been here long enough to become fluent in the language, and I’m proud to have culturally assimilated.” In even simpler terms, we’re saying “I’m a member of the group.” We’re signaling group membership, but beyond that, we’re signaling loyalty. This also means exercising boundaries between who is in the group, and who is out of the group. By using jargon and terms that can be almost meaningless to an out-group, we effectively maintain group boundaries. This is comparable to cryptic military language, which Corporate English in fact draws a terrible lot from.
When we praise newbie Steve from the Customer Experience team for “hitting the ground running” on a given project, we’re inscribing Steve in a lineage of Corporate myth-making. Steve might’ve only updated a few Excel spreadsheets, held some group meetings on Microsoft Teams, and finished his project on time, but it would be boring to describe these tasks as such. It would be too mundane. Instead, we render banal, ordinary white-collar tasks into epic exploits through paramilitary jargon to aggrandize a rather bland reality. The sentence “Steve did a great job and finished his project on time” makes you want to yawn and stretch back on your ergonomic office chair. The sentence “Steve hit the ground running and demonstrated strategic agility from Q1 to Q3” makes you imagine Steve in a camo uniform, jumping out of a helicopter under the veils of midnight. In the end, Steve may have only gotten a Dominos Pizza gift card upon his work completion, but in the collective subconscious, Steve was given the Medal Of Honor.
Perhaps these verbal tactics serve as coping mechanisms to palliate the fatigue most corporate workers feel, especially now, at a time when mass layoffs increased workloads. Logging on or clocking in at 9 a.m. on a Monday doesn’t inspire joy and enthusiasm in most people. It’s painfully ordinary. For self-preservation, we trick ourselves into bedazzling that mind-numbing reality, not externally in visible ways, but internally, inside our heads—sometimes individually, sometimes collectively.
Beneath all of that, there is a much simpler truth at core: we use words to shape our reality. Whether that means using a language, a dialect, or a set of familiar idioms, we use words like a painter uses colors to decorate a plain canvas. Much like the theory of linguistic relativity proposes that the language we speak influences how we perceive and think about the world, our self-perceived verboseness shapes our reality. When we use Latin, Greek, or scientific terms, we feel educated, we feel smart—smarter than others, perhaps. Similarly, the use of Corporate English establishes in its users a feeling of work fluency, of being knowledgeable and sophisticated.
All in all, we’re all deeply, simply human. We seek belonging, we seek validation, and hope the loyalty we show outwardly is reciprocated. When we use the language of the tribe, whether in Ancient Greece or modern corporate offices, we’re not just communicating. We’re performing. We’re signaling that we understand the rules, that we belong, and that we can be trusted by fellow group members. Corporate English may look like a collection of empty buzzwords and catchy phrases (I’ll come clean now: I’m not any different, I’ve used them too), but it functions like any other group dialect: it protects its members, hides the truth when needed, and reinforces the hierarchy that keeps the group coherent. We talk like this because it gives shape to the shapeless, meaning to the mundane, and belonging to the lonely. That’s why Orwell was right: words shape thought, and thought shapes reality. Yet, the reason Corporate English spreads so easily is simple: we are social creatures who want to be understood and included. Beneath all the jargon, beneath all the euphemisms, and all the performative fluency, the impulse is profoundly human: we want to be part of something, and sometimes, the easiest way to belong is simply to speak the language.
Sources
Ding, Y., & Ma, S. (2023). Return-to-office mandates. SSRN.
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4675401
King’s College London. (n.d.). UK workers increasingly rejecting return-to-office mandates, study finds.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/uk-workers-increasingly-rejecting-return-to-office-mandates-study-finds
King’s College London, Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. (2023). Return-to-office mandates: What is at stake?
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/giwl/assets/return-to-office-mandates-what-is-at-stake.pdf
Orwell, G. (1946). Politics and the English language.
Aude Calloch 
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