Moving forward, can we not

circle back, please?

There was a glorious decade starting in the late ‘70s when heartwarming TV ads encouraged us to “reach out and touch someone,” via an old-school telephone which had no caller ID whatsoever — you had to answer with a “hello?” to find out who had your number — and boasted rad push-buttons¹ and curly cords.

Rob is calling home from college and mom is so excited to say “Hello?” and find out it’s her son! 1987 AT&T ad.

Sadly, the phrase “reach out” has been co-opted by the demons of buzzword speak, and I’m against it. You might wonder, as I did, what is the difference between buzzwords and jargon. Are they equally offensive? They can be, for different reasons, but simply stated, jargon is the specific technical language of an industry. To review:

Film-sound industry: Next time I’d use a boom to reduce handling noise from your rig - and switch to a larger shotgun mic for a more direct pickup pattern. I’d be sure to grab a zeppelin for it with another dead cat to kill all that wind. If you really need to stay close, you can get a pistol grip to replace the boom, but both are handy. (Thanks, Joan!)

Computer programming industry: It looks as if the bug is due to fall through logic in the PROCEDURE-DIVISION. The logic should include a GO TO sentence to take care of data that falls outside the stated parameters. (Thanks, Mom!)

Concrete construction industry: Can you plumb that center point so we can run a diagonal and make a square? (Thanks, Austin!)

People outside of these fields won’t necessarily understand what these lines mean, and their use in mixed company can be exclusionary. But they also create a means of communicating that is specific and clear to others in the same field as you. When jargon is off-putting, it’s when you’re using it with people who don’t understand the terminology. Just don’t do that.

Buzzwords, on the other hand, are intended to inflate the perception of a person’s knowledge. They originated in the 1940s at Harvard among business school students who used buzzwords to help study important concepts, and then those buzzwords crept into their submitted work. From the wikipedia: researchers noticed that by using buzzwords, “business students could speak with apparent authority. It also seemed as if using the right buzzword was more important than what the student came up with as an answer.” Those students may have primarily pressed nouns into service as buzzwords, but we now have a variety of grammatical options, particularly verb phrases and prepositional phrases, to bolster our office vocabulary.

You’ve surely heard some of them. Here’s a tiny slice of the buzzword landscape:

• put a pin in it

• put a finer point on it

• thread the needle

• move the needle²

• in the weeds

• in the loop

• piggyback on

• reach out

• synergy

• learnings

• at the end of the day

• nimble/agile

• actionable

• win (noun)

• up (verb)

For fun, let’s assemble some different selections into a paragraph:

The 30,000-foot view of this problem shows us that we have to involve more stakeholders. But once we do a deep dive and unpack the data, we can see that the issue is more nuanced than we thought. Best practice in this case shows that we need to up our capacity, since these skills aren’t in our wheelhouse. Moving forward, we’ll speak to the specific challenges around this issue. Those pieces are the low-hanging fruit. Then we can circle back and touch base on next steps.

Can you find them? Here’s the paragraph again with the buzzwords bolded.

The 30,000-foot view of this problem shows us that we have to involve more stakeholders. But once we do a deep dive and unpack the data, we can see that the issue³ is more nuanced than we thought. Best practice in this case shows that we need to up⁴ our capacity, since these skills aren’t in our wheelhouse. Moving forward, we’ll speak to the specific challenges around this issue. Those pieces are the low-hanging fruit. Then we can circle back and touch base on next steps.

If you are thinking, “I use these words. There’s nothing wrong with them!” Certainly, you’re right. Carry on, especially if everyone around you is carrying on in like fashion. They do sometimes convey ideas in a unique way, such as the 30,000-foot view.

But as a certified word nerd and recovering English teacher, I reject imprecise language, and buzzwords are nothing if not imprecise. As a teacher I called these “weasel words”: they allow you weasel out of saying what you really mean to say, which would require taxing your brain to elicit more accurate diction. They don’t count as metaphors though some are figurative, such as “low-hanging fruit” and all the references to needles and sharp things. They’re not intended to be descriptive, technical, or even truly helpful. You’d never write an instruction book with these terms in it, because they are vague.

Another trait of buzzwords is they are trendy. Remember “think outside the box?” It sounds so early-2000s now! “Piece” appears to be one of the newest buzzwords, having arrived in the last few months, at least to my ears. It is one of my least favorite. It means anything from “process” to “component” to “part” to “step” to “idea” to “problem” and because its vagueness makes it versatile, it promises to stick around.

Another new language habit I’ve noticed is using “around” instead of “about” or “on.” I’m not going to argue this is only a business buzzword because I think it’s ubiquitous, but it annoys me so I’m including it here. Examples: “Let’s have some conversation around this topic.” “I’m going to need time to process the new guidance around procedures.” “She and I need to do some planning around the new project.”

One that I fight myself on — ironically, given the lede — is “reach out,” because it’s sometimes hard to find a suitable replacement. If you’re in a meeting and you indicate that you’ll take on the responsibility of following up with someone, it’s easier to say “I’ll reach out” than to explain that you’ll send an email and await a response. I’m trying hard to avoid it, though. And on that note, I’m not perfect. Have you found a typo, a misused word, overuse of “that” or the verb “to be” in my newsletters? A buzzword I haven’t used facetiously? I’ll own it all. It doesn’t mean I can’t still find buzzwords irritating AF.

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I’m all for language evolution. I absolutely love new words, and I dig newly invented uses of old words. Because humanity. ← there’s an example.⁵⁶ Urban Dictionary is my favorite for a catalog of these.⁷ For a while I wanted to be a linguistic anthropologist so I could study the evolution of language alongside human culture. Language changes over time, with pronunciation and word invention leading the way, and conventions such as spelling lagging far behind.⁸ This aspect of language fascinates me.

Buzzwords are not that. They are chintzy and shallow. Buzzwords primarily function to indicate that you’re in The Club. However, after writing this whole newsletter I think I may have hit upon a way to appreciate them! What if, instead of grinding my teeth every time some says they’ll keep me in the loop, I could think of the words as my own personal sociolinguistic research project! Catalog, research, analyze, reflect, report? The etymology learnings alone would be worth the effort.

It’s certainly a piece worth digging into.

Let me put a pin in it and circle back.

1. as opposed to rotary. So space-age.

2. so many sharp things in the business world

3. I also hate “issue” as it has become this weird euphemism for “problem.” Why can’t we just have problems? Do we have to turn everything into a world conflict?

4. “up” as a verb is just obnoxious and it’s everywhere, not just in the business world.

5. You’re supposed to use “because” as the first part of a two-word preposition “because of” or else as a subordinating conjunction before a dependent clause.

6. See that? I just used English geek jargon on you! How did that feel? Did it evoke anxiety from your high school days?

7. In fact, please review what the Urban Dictionary has to say about the common buzzword “moving forward” here.

8. Cough, slough, though, bough… you can read why here. It has to do with Middle English (1300s) but the point is, we quickly change how we say things but spelling change is slow.