Should we use jargon?
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Hello and welcome to Learning English for Work and our special series all about jargon. I'm Phil. And I'm Pippa. In this series we've been talking about some of the strange words and phrases we use at work – business jargon. As we've mentioned in the series, lots of people find jargon annoying or difficult to understand –

So today we're going to look more at why we use jargon and whether it's helpful in our working lives. Find a transcript for this episode to read along on our website bbclearningenglish.com. Now, earlier this year we made a programme all about jargon with our colleagues at Business Daily, a BBC World Service business series.

Their reporter, Ed Butler, spoke to Anna Maloney, a journalist at the London financial newspaper City AM. And Anna's been writing a new column, highlighting a different piece of corporate jargon each week. So, Anna, let's just pick up the paper. Yeah.

So what have we got here? Today we're highlighting stakeholder, which I think is a particularly insidious one. Anna's jargon of the week is stakeholder. Now, this means anyone who's involved in a company and has an interest in it being successful. So employees are stakeholders, but also the people who own the company are stakeholders, the customers, the clients, all of those kinds of people.

But Anna says the word stakeholder has become jargon. She calls it insidious, which means it is gradually causing harm. Most often, when you're referring to a stakeholder, I think people usually are referring to themselves, you know.

We need to consider key stakeholders in this decision for everyone to come back in the office five days a week. What that means is, well, I've grown rather accustomed to my Friday morning yoga and I don't want to be back in the office. Exactly. You've been doing this column for nine months, right? Yes. How do people respond to it, your readers?

This has been one feature that our readers have really engaged with. They're our biggest culprits, but also the biggest haters. And I think this is a key feature. You know, we all love to hate it. But statistically, you know, some of us are also we're using it every day. Anna says that readers of the newspaper really enjoy the column. But those readers are the same people who use the jargon Anna writes about all the time at work.

So we've got here people are complaining about this jargon, but actually they're the ones who use it. Yes, I think we're all guilty of that, Phil. So often we've talked about bits of jargon in this series that we find annoying, but we also use them. And sometimes you actually hear someone complaining about jargon or a certain phrase they don't like, and then they use a load of jargon just to talk about what they don't like about it. So it's everywhere. It's kind of part of our everyday language at work. ♪

Our colleagues at Business Daily asked BBC World Service listeners on Facebook about business jargon and lots of people mentioned being frustrated by jargon or hearing it too much at work. Let's look at a few examples. OK, so we had deep dive, which is where you look at something in detail.

Yeah, we had cascade. Somebody suggested this. This is where you pass on information. So somebody at the top of the organisation sends it to a few people and then they cascade it. They send it to their employees and down the chain of command, as it were. And then you have synergy, which is when everyone is working well together, possibly because the information has been well cascaded to them.

And it's this idea that working together is more powerful than everyone working on their own. And interestingly, some commenters said that they're now retired, but reading all the examples on the Facebook post made them feel quite stressed. So maybe part of why we dislike this language is because it reminds us of work and any stress associated with the world of work. So another common criticism of jargon is that it's vague. So it's difficult to know for sure what someone's talking about.

Yeah, and I spoke to John Fazzett, who is an expert in workplace culture and language dynamics from St Mary's University in Nova Scotia in Canada. And John believes that some jargon used by businesses is deliberately difficult to understand. One of the interesting things about this corporate jargon or corporate language

corporate ease or however you want to say it, is a lot of the time when that's used, it's to remove meaning. For example, like you're being fired. No, we're having a corporate downsizing or a right sizing now. That's how they're using these terms. So it's again, removing some of the pain and moving some of the meaning behind things to seem innocuous. A lot of these terms are meant to

kind of mask the real intent behind some of the decisions that are being made and for that matter make people sound a little smarter than they are. John is concerned that people are using corporateese, that's corporate language,

to make what they're saying seem innocuous or harmless. Yes, and we talked about this in our series Office English. We mentioned some of the language used at work to talk about bad news and it's not always clear. So John mentioned downsizing and rightsizing. People don't like these terms but also people don't like losing their jobs. It's a difficult thing for us to talk about.

So I spoke to Anne Curzon, professor of English language at the University of Michigan, who thinks that sometimes we love to hate jargon just a bit too much. One of the things that you see is that there is language that used to be considered jargon that now we don't even notice. And a great example of that is the verb finalise.

which in the late 1960s was seen as bureaucratic jargon. It was criticized and really quite soundly disliked.

And over time, over the past few decades, the criticism has declined. And at this point, when I tell people that that verb used to be considered jargon, they're often surprised because it doesn't feel jargony at all. But incentivize feels very jargony. Anne says we often find new words annoying at work, but over time they become normal.

Yeah, and this is true of other language change too. For example, lots of people use new words and phrases on social media and some people find this annoying or say that the new expressions aren't proper English, but usually we get used to them over time. Yes, new language does often get criticised. And Anne also thinks that our dislike of business jargon in particular could demonstrate what we think about business more generally.

Honestly, I think there may also be a deeper concern reflected in criticisms of business jargon about the role of business in our society. And there certainly are people who are worried that corporate culture and business generally has taken on an outsized role socially. And that may, again, get reflected in complaints about business jargon.

Anne says some people are concerned that corporate culture has an outsized role in our society. That means that the world of work and business is too big a part of our lives. Lots of people criticise jargon, but as Anne Curtin said, gradually we start to use new jargon terms and then eventually we don't even think of them as jargon anymore.

So, yeah, in this series we hope we've helped you understand more strange jargon, what it means and when to use it. Send us any words and phrases you don't understand to learning.english at bbc.co.uk. That's it for this episode of Learning English for Work. We're taking a break over Christmas and New Year, but we'll be back with more episodes next year. Until then, find loads more resources to help you with your English on our website –

Why not follow our podcast, Learning English from the News, to learn the language to talk about big news stories? Search Learning English from the News in your podcast app. And if you want to listen to the full programme we made with Business Daily about business jargon, you can find a link in the notes for this episode. Bye for now. Bye. Bye.

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