Posts Tagged ‘business’
share a thought : corporate mumbo jumbo
i sit here and i am reading my strategy notes for my exams. i am ploughing through the textbook when a memory from an english class in secondary school jolts me.
it was a class on euphemisms and one that i will never forget. the english teacher played a tape on this man relating to us how language has ’softened’ over time. i vaguely remember an example. the man told us that after WW2, many soldiers were scarred from the horrors of the battlefield. they called it shell shock. the two words effectively conveyed the magnitude of the problem affecting the person, without hiding any details. however, many years later, i think the person mentioned after the Gulf War in the 90s, the very same shell shock was too hard to be handled. shell shock was now known as post-traumatic stress disorder. something that was plainly understood was de-constructed, complicated, elongated and well, made into that.
which brings me to my strategy notes. i read all these big words: social capital (friendships & working relationships), decision architecture (guidelines for selecting something), causal ambiguity (ok you got me), etc. perhaps they help bring meaning to things that are easy to get but difficult to describe. but they sound so pompous, so big, so full of nothing.
no wonder people hide behind these words of nothingness.
ok back to strategy.
