I don’t understand why business people do this to themselves. I quit working for large organizations in favor of smaller companies that pay less, because at least there’s much less of this. It does get unbearable.
Lingo is a powerful social tool. Once you know to look for it, you see it everywhere.
Some lingo is always necessary for jobs to communicate complex ideas quickly. Everyone has terms and phrases used in their profession that are exclusive to it, as well as some that are exclusive to their workplace. People outside of their job don’t know the lingo, those inside do. In this way lingo is a double-edged sword: it eases communication, but creates a social barrier between those in the know and everyone else.
In an increasing number of places this isolating side effect has been used by certain groups as the motivation for them to contrive lingo. For a long time this was largely relegated to cults and other fringe groups that wanted to shore up the feeling of togetherness of the people within and keep them away from outsiders.
The big change was when groups found that by constantly changing the lingo they could induce two other effects: the exclusion of outsiders and exerting control over existing insiders. The MBA/business types are a prime example of this. For people in or seeking to be a part of the group knowing the latest buzzwords is a must, and not knowing them or using outdated ones opens them up to being ostracized. People who are “in” must constantly stay up to date, thus staying attentive to the trends of the group. At the same time people with a casual interest or interaction are actively dissuaded by how often unfamiliar words are used by members of the group.
This sort of weaponized use of lingo is much more widespread these days. Once you see it in this case you can find it in just about every flavor of modern political group and online forum. If you find a group that seems to always be changing its buzzwords, buyer beware.
The only thing I would disagree on is that lingo is a recent phenomenon. That’s just recency bias.
The Catholic Church used Latin at mass from its inception to the mid-20th century, and the oldest Greek versions of the Bible already use some words we simply have never seen anywhere else.
Philosophers have always been a notorious PITA with using existing words or close derivatives of existing words with different meanings, sometimes the lingo is specific to a single author.
And let’s not even get into judicial lingo and its very ancient and storied use of disenfranchising the less fortunate who did not speak it and could not afford a lawyer to speak it for them - that is when the court system wasn’t in Latin.
Corporate lingo takes more room in our lives as large corporations take up more and more of the economic and political landscape (with some interesting evolutions in form thanks to the influence of Globish). That’s it.
The only thing I would disagree on is that lingo is a recent phenomenon. That’s just recency bias.
Ever-changing lingo is almost certainly a recent phenomenon, as the pace and frequency of communication has changed drastically recently.
It’s difficult to get a new buzzword to float to a massive audience without mass communication. More recently, the president can invent a new buzzword (e.g. one I remember viscerally is "WMD"s which I swear I had never heard before the run-up to the Iraq war) and have social media, mass media, and individual people saying it in under a week.
I also think this is partly why “Gen Z speak” sounds so strange to my ear. When I heard “rizz” I knew without looking it up that it was invented and dispersed in online circles. Sure, there have been other generations with their own lingo, but other generations didn’t cook up country-wide or even worldwide lingo that can be directly attributed to one YouTube personality or another. Growing up I very, very rarely heard people using online subculture speak (e.g. l33t sp34k) in real life because we all knew it would sound fucking stupid.
You’re just getting old. Things have perhaps gotten a little faster in general, but Gen Z didn’t invent slang. Also “skibbidy rizz” is Gen Alpha more than Z. And slang very rarely is attributable to a single personality. Apparently Kai Cenat popularized “rizz”, but it had existed for a long time before and has way outgrown him. The vast majority of people who unironically say “rizz” don’t even know who he is.
The linguistic phenomenon isn’t even linked to the internet particularly. It’s just a contraction of “charisma”, hardly an unusual way for slang to emerge pre-internet and not comparable to 1337 5p34k which never made it out of terminally online subcultures.
Before the internet, radio, TV, and the press were effective tools for massively spreading slang. Boomers had no issues making “cool” cool, as well as a bunch of other slang words that unlike “cool” aren’t cool anymore.
Your generation had “WMDs” but I’m sure boomers had similar things with Vietnam, and their parents with WWII. Hell, in 1918 or so the entire world learned the phrase “Spanish flu” like we did “COVID”. The more things change the more they stay the same.
And how can we forget “OK” whose origins are mysterious but generally people agree it comes from a short lived 19th century linguistic fad that gave “Oll Korrect” (what’s for sure is that “okay” came after “OK”). Now “OK” is quite possibly the most universal word in existence. Sure back then it probably took a few years to spread within the anglosphere, but OTOH there was also much more dialectic variability in language across regions so it’s not like there was less going on, it was just more fragmented.
People have always been going crazy with language and each generation appropriates their mother tongue in their unique way. The idea that language is even remotely static or “used to be less crazy” is entirely false, yet every generation perpetuates this idea when confronted with new slang they don’t understand.
I couldn’t understand what you were saying, you didn’t use nearly enough lingo, so I translated it.
"Ah, the almighty power of lingo—like the Swiss Army knife of social circles. Once you’re hip to the jargon game, it’s like spotting Easter eggs in every convo. At work, lingo’s the secret sauce for pushing complex ideas through the pipeline fast. But hey, here’s the kicker: it’s like having a VIP pass—you’re either in the club or left standing outside.
Now, here’s where it gets spicy. Some folks take that lingo and flip the script—they don’t just use it, they manufacture it like a startup cranking out MVPs. Back in the day, this was mostly culty vibes, fringe-y circles looking to get the ‘us vs. them’ mojo going. But then boom—the suits came in, turned it into a science, and voilà, welcome to Corporate Speak 2.0.
MBA-types are the real MVPs here. Knowing the latest buzzwords is like holding the golden ticket. If you’re still rocking last quarter’s vocab, well, tough luck—you’re getting a one-way ticket to Outsider-ville. Gotta keep your buzzword game on point, always watching the trends, or else risk going full ‘legacy system.’ Meanwhile, casuals who just want to dip a toe in? They’re hitting the eject button as soon as they hear ‘synergize’ for the tenth time.
But hey, it’s not just the corporate world—we’ve got weaponized lingo all over the place now. Find a group that keeps updating their lingo like it’s firmware? Yeah, you might wanna run a virus scan on that one."
Optimizing Lingo as a Transformational, Value-Add Social Leveraging Mechanism
In the current hyper-dynamic, synergistic landscape, lingo is a critical facilitator of cross-functional knowledge transfer, enabling holistic communication frameworks to be embedded within organizational matrices. Once the stakeholder acquires the bandwidth to proactively surface these paradigm-shifting levers, it becomes apparent that this vernacular is omnipresent across multiple channels of engagement and value streams.
Operational lingo, when fully actualized, becomes a game-changer for driving frictionless workflows and delivering on mission-aligned, results-oriented KPIs. Each ecosystem—whether enterprise-level or bespoke—cultivates a differentiated lexicon of granularized actionables and strategic terminology, enhancing the cross-pollination of intellectual capital. However, this also perpetuates segmentation, as those external to core stakeholder groups often lack the strategic alignment or context to operationalize these linguistic frameworks. Thus, lingo operates as a double-edged value driver: enhancing scalability of communication while concurrently constructing barriers to entry for non-value-aligned players.
Recently, we have seen an inflection point where these outcome-driven segmentation tactics have been scaled by emergent thought leaders to build ecosystem-specific, exclusionary lexicons. Historically, this practice was decentralized to fringe, non-synergistic clusters seeking to optimize internal cohesion while leveraging exclusivity as a differentiator. However, we are now experiencing a shift in the value chain dynamics.
Forward-facing market disruptors and blue-chip entities have identified that iterative pivots in proprietary lingo ecosystems can facilitate two core outcomes: exclusion of non-core, low-engagement stakeholders, and the amplification of influence across in-network human capital. The MBA/business sector provides a best-in-class use case for this kind of transformational buzzword orchestration. For key players aiming to optimize their seat at the table and maintain an upward trajectory within the talent pipeline, maintaining fluency in bleeding-edge terminology is table stakes. Failure to operationalize these linguistic shifts exposes individuals to significant delta in personal brand equity, rendering them non-competitive in the talent marketplace. Conversely, those maintaining a pulse on agile trend-spotting ensure they remain mission-critical, driving bottom-line ROI. Meanwhile, non-core participants with limited value contribution are effectively right-sized through continuous deployment of next-gen verbiage.
This transformative use of weaponized lingo is now a best practice across multiple verticals. Once you architect the mental model to map this strategic framework, its scalable applications can be identified across virtually every touchpoint in the socio-political ecosystem, digital community infrastructures, and high-growth market disruptors. If you encounter a team consistently beta-testing and iterating its buzzword bandwidth, consider this a key risk factor for potential high-barrier entry scenarios. Maintain strategic agility.
Now we’re in full-on C-suite bingo territory! How’s that for unintelligibility?
Are you implying that on point is an example of this type of lingo?
A quick search shows me that on point has been used in the military as a way to describe a soldier being stationed at their post or standing guard as far back as the 1880s. It was used in ballet in the early 1900s, and used in legal contexts in the 1930s.
When the “lingo” that the slang is derived from dates back to the 1880s, almost 150 years ago, I think it ceases to be lingo and just becomes language.
Yes, “on point” is slang, but only just recently. Slag is just a little further down the scale in terms of specialized language.
The real test is how accepted a word or phrase is with the larger population using a given language (while keeping a specific meaning in mind). This gets a little muddied with the lingo used by larger groups.
For instance the phrases “weird” and “cat lady” have both been co-opted by the major political parties in this election to decide their opponents. Because they each have so many members and because their discourse is covered by media outlets the new connotations of those phrases will be more widely known outside of the group and will stop being lingo much faster than the phrases you use privately with your family or coworkers.
“On point” used to be lingo in the military once upon a time, but because of the size of the military (and aided by the internet) it has become slang and is no longer a phrase only used by a certain group.
And there’s the rub. Lingo isn’t inherently evil, in fact it’s necessary to get through day-to-day life. You can’t refer to every tool you use on the job with a short sentence explaining what it is, you say it’s name and the people you work with know what you’re talking about. The only time lingo must be avoided is when talking about something you’re familiar with with someone who isn’t to avoid putting them off or confusing them.
The real danger is people not realizing how (contrived, constantly changing) lingo can be used to manipulate them, specifically how it drives tribalism and the “us versus them” mentality. This is especially important given how political movements and other groups behave online, and how prevalent this tactic has become over the past decade.
I don’t understand why business people do this to themselves. I quit working for large organizations in favor of smaller companies that pay less, because at least there’s much less of this. It does get unbearable.
Lingo is a powerful social tool. Once you know to look for it, you see it everywhere.
Some lingo is always necessary for jobs to communicate complex ideas quickly. Everyone has terms and phrases used in their profession that are exclusive to it, as well as some that are exclusive to their workplace. People outside of their job don’t know the lingo, those inside do. In this way lingo is a double-edged sword: it eases communication, but creates a social barrier between those in the know and everyone else.
In an increasing number of places this isolating side effect has been used by certain groups as the motivation for them to contrive lingo. For a long time this was largely relegated to cults and other fringe groups that wanted to shore up the feeling of togetherness of the people within and keep them away from outsiders.
The big change was when groups found that by constantly changing the lingo they could induce two other effects: the exclusion of outsiders and exerting control over existing insiders. The MBA/business types are a prime example of this. For people in or seeking to be a part of the group knowing the latest buzzwords is a must, and not knowing them or using outdated ones opens them up to being ostracized. People who are “in” must constantly stay up to date, thus staying attentive to the trends of the group. At the same time people with a casual interest or interaction are actively dissuaded by how often unfamiliar words are used by members of the group.
This sort of weaponized use of lingo is much more widespread these days. Once you see it in this case you can find it in just about every flavor of modern political group and online forum. If you find a group that seems to always be changing its buzzwords, buyer beware.
The only thing I would disagree on is that lingo is a recent phenomenon. That’s just recency bias.
The Catholic Church used Latin at mass from its inception to the mid-20th century, and the oldest Greek versions of the Bible already use some words we simply have never seen anywhere else.
Philosophers have always been a notorious PITA with using existing words or close derivatives of existing words with different meanings, sometimes the lingo is specific to a single author.
And let’s not even get into judicial lingo and its very ancient and storied use of disenfranchising the less fortunate who did not speak it and could not afford a lawyer to speak it for them - that is when the court system wasn’t in Latin.
Corporate lingo takes more room in our lives as large corporations take up more and more of the economic and political landscape (with some interesting evolutions in form thanks to the influence of Globish). That’s it.
Ever-changing lingo is almost certainly a recent phenomenon, as the pace and frequency of communication has changed drastically recently.
It’s difficult to get a new buzzword to float to a massive audience without mass communication. More recently, the president can invent a new buzzword (e.g. one I remember viscerally is "WMD"s which I swear I had never heard before the run-up to the Iraq war) and have social media, mass media, and individual people saying it in under a week.
I also think this is partly why “Gen Z speak” sounds so strange to my ear. When I heard “rizz” I knew without looking it up that it was invented and dispersed in online circles. Sure, there have been other generations with their own lingo, but other generations didn’t cook up country-wide or even worldwide lingo that can be directly attributed to one YouTube personality or another. Growing up I very, very rarely heard people using online subculture speak (e.g. l33t sp34k) in real life because we all knew it would sound fucking stupid.
You’re just getting old. Things have perhaps gotten a little faster in general, but Gen Z didn’t invent slang. Also “skibbidy rizz” is Gen Alpha more than Z. And slang very rarely is attributable to a single personality. Apparently Kai Cenat popularized “rizz”, but it had existed for a long time before and has way outgrown him. The vast majority of people who unironically say “rizz” don’t even know who he is.
The linguistic phenomenon isn’t even linked to the internet particularly. It’s just a contraction of “charisma”, hardly an unusual way for slang to emerge pre-internet and not comparable to 1337 5p34k which never made it out of terminally online subcultures.
Before the internet, radio, TV, and the press were effective tools for massively spreading slang. Boomers had no issues making “cool” cool, as well as a bunch of other slang words that unlike “cool” aren’t cool anymore.
Your generation had “WMDs” but I’m sure boomers had similar things with Vietnam, and their parents with WWII. Hell, in 1918 or so the entire world learned the phrase “Spanish flu” like we did “COVID”. The more things change the more they stay the same.
And how can we forget “OK” whose origins are mysterious but generally people agree it comes from a short lived 19th century linguistic fad that gave “Oll Korrect” (what’s for sure is that “okay” came after “OK”). Now “OK” is quite possibly the most universal word in existence. Sure back then it probably took a few years to spread within the anglosphere, but OTOH there was also much more dialectic variability in language across regions so it’s not like there was less going on, it was just more fragmented.
People have always been going crazy with language and each generation appropriates their mother tongue in their unique way. The idea that language is even remotely static or “used to be less crazy” is entirely false, yet every generation perpetuates this idea when confronted with new slang they don’t understand.
I couldn’t understand what you were saying, you didn’t use nearly enough lingo, so I translated it.
"Ah, the almighty power of lingo—like the Swiss Army knife of social circles. Once you’re hip to the jargon game, it’s like spotting Easter eggs in every convo. At work, lingo’s the secret sauce for pushing complex ideas through the pipeline fast. But hey, here’s the kicker: it’s like having a VIP pass—you’re either in the club or left standing outside.
Now, here’s where it gets spicy. Some folks take that lingo and flip the script—they don’t just use it, they manufacture it like a startup cranking out MVPs. Back in the day, this was mostly culty vibes, fringe-y circles looking to get the ‘us vs. them’ mojo going. But then boom—the suits came in, turned it into a science, and voilà, welcome to Corporate Speak 2.0.
MBA-types are the real MVPs here. Knowing the latest buzzwords is like holding the golden ticket. If you’re still rocking last quarter’s vocab, well, tough luck—you’re getting a one-way ticket to Outsider-ville. Gotta keep your buzzword game on point, always watching the trends, or else risk going full ‘legacy system.’ Meanwhile, casuals who just want to dip a toe in? They’re hitting the eject button as soon as they hear ‘synergize’ for the tenth time.
But hey, it’s not just the corporate world—we’ve got weaponized lingo all over the place now. Find a group that keeps updating their lingo like it’s firmware? Yeah, you might wanna run a virus scan on that one."
I translated it to c-suite corporate-speak:
Optimizing Lingo as a Transformational, Value-Add Social Leveraging Mechanism
In the current hyper-dynamic, synergistic landscape, lingo is a critical facilitator of cross-functional knowledge transfer, enabling holistic communication frameworks to be embedded within organizational matrices. Once the stakeholder acquires the bandwidth to proactively surface these paradigm-shifting levers, it becomes apparent that this vernacular is omnipresent across multiple channels of engagement and value streams.
Operational lingo, when fully actualized, becomes a game-changer for driving frictionless workflows and delivering on mission-aligned, results-oriented KPIs. Each ecosystem—whether enterprise-level or bespoke—cultivates a differentiated lexicon of granularized actionables and strategic terminology, enhancing the cross-pollination of intellectual capital. However, this also perpetuates segmentation, as those external to core stakeholder groups often lack the strategic alignment or context to operationalize these linguistic frameworks. Thus, lingo operates as a double-edged value driver: enhancing scalability of communication while concurrently constructing barriers to entry for non-value-aligned players.
Recently, we have seen an inflection point where these outcome-driven segmentation tactics have been scaled by emergent thought leaders to build ecosystem-specific, exclusionary lexicons. Historically, this practice was decentralized to fringe, non-synergistic clusters seeking to optimize internal cohesion while leveraging exclusivity as a differentiator. However, we are now experiencing a shift in the value chain dynamics.
Forward-facing market disruptors and blue-chip entities have identified that iterative pivots in proprietary lingo ecosystems can facilitate two core outcomes: exclusion of non-core, low-engagement stakeholders, and the amplification of influence across in-network human capital. The MBA/business sector provides a best-in-class use case for this kind of transformational buzzword orchestration. For key players aiming to optimize their seat at the table and maintain an upward trajectory within the talent pipeline, maintaining fluency in bleeding-edge terminology is table stakes. Failure to operationalize these linguistic shifts exposes individuals to significant delta in personal brand equity, rendering them non-competitive in the talent marketplace. Conversely, those maintaining a pulse on agile trend-spotting ensure they remain mission-critical, driving bottom-line ROI. Meanwhile, non-core participants with limited value contribution are effectively right-sized through continuous deployment of next-gen verbiage.
This transformative use of weaponized lingo is now a best practice across multiple verticals. Once you architect the mental model to map this strategic framework, its scalable applications can be identified across virtually every touchpoint in the socio-political ecosystem, digital community infrastructures, and high-growth market disruptors. If you encounter a team consistently beta-testing and iterating its buzzword bandwidth, consider this a key risk factor for potential high-barrier entry scenarios. Maintain strategic agility.
Now we’re in full-on C-suite bingo territory! How’s that for unintelligibility?
I hate this. Seething hatred.
Thanks, I hate it
Send a bondulance, I’m having a stronk.
You are “on point”. 😁
I try to use as little lingo as possible, only as much as necessary.
That’s also part of the game. People who over-use lingo are recognized as bullshitters.
Are you implying that on point is an example of this type of lingo?
A quick search shows me that on point has been used in the military as a way to describe a soldier being stationed at their post or standing guard as far back as the 1880s. It was used in ballet in the early 1900s, and used in legal contexts in the 1930s.
When the “lingo” that the slang is derived from dates back to the 1880s, almost 150 years ago, I think it ceases to be lingo and just becomes language.
Yes, “on point” is slang, but only just recently. Slag is just a little further down the scale in terms of specialized language.
The real test is how accepted a word or phrase is with the larger population using a given language (while keeping a specific meaning in mind). This gets a little muddied with the lingo used by larger groups.
For instance the phrases “weird” and “cat lady” have both been co-opted by the major political parties in this election to decide their opponents. Because they each have so many members and because their discourse is covered by media outlets the new connotations of those phrases will be more widely known outside of the group and will stop being lingo much faster than the phrases you use privately with your family or coworkers.
“On point” used to be lingo in the military once upon a time, but because of the size of the military (and aided by the internet) it has become slang and is no longer a phrase only used by a certain group.
And there’s the rub. Lingo isn’t inherently evil, in fact it’s necessary to get through day-to-day life. You can’t refer to every tool you use on the job with a short sentence explaining what it is, you say it’s name and the people you work with know what you’re talking about. The only time lingo must be avoided is when talking about something you’re familiar with with someone who isn’t to avoid putting them off or confusing them.
The real danger is people not realizing how (contrived, constantly changing) lingo can be used to manipulate them, specifically how it drives tribalism and the “us versus them” mentality. This is especially important given how political movements and other groups behave online, and how prevalent this tactic has become over the past decade.