The hum of the server room was the only thing making sense. Across the particleboard desk, my manager, David, was arranging his face into a mask of earnest mentorship. It was performance review day. He leaned forward, the fabric of his shirt straining, and delivered the line.

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“We really want to empower you to leverage your synergies and operationalize key learnings moving forward.”

— David, My Manager

I blinked. The words hung in the air like dust motes in a sunbeam-you see them, but they have no weight, no substance. Was I being praised? Was this a warning? Was I being fired in the nicest, most meaningless way possible? My brain scrambled for a translator, an emotional decoder ring, but found only the low-grade panic of utter incomprehension. It felt like trying to read a legal document underwater. That’s the genius of modern corporate language: it has the cadence of communication without the burden of actual meaning. It’s a shield, a fog, a perfectly calibrated weapon of mass confusion designed to protect the speaker from the terrible risk of being understood.

The Hypocrite’s Dilemma

I hate this language. I truly do. I find myself railing against it, mocking the empty platitudes and the buzzword bingo that passes for a strategy meeting. And yet, last Tuesday, I sent an email that contained the following sentence:

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“We need to actionize our deliverables by EOD to drive stakeholder value.”

— Me, Last Tuesday

I know. I actually typed that. My fingers did it. I was tired, it was 4:46 PM, and I was trying to communicate urgency to a team that was already burned out. The direct approach-“We are behind schedule and if we don’t finish this today, we risk losing the client”-felt too confrontational, too sharp. So I reached for the corporate Novocain. I injected the request with a dose of meaningless jargon to numb the impact. In that moment, I became the very thing I despise. A walking, talking, synergy-leveraging hypocrite.

This linguistic fog isn’t a victimless crime. It creates a culture where no one is accountable because nothing is ever said directly. Problems can’t be solved if they can’t be accurately named. Instead of saying “Sales are down 26%,” we say, “We’re encountering some challenging headwinds and need to pivot our value proposition to better align with market dynamics.” The first statement is a fact that demands a response. The second is a corporate lullaby designed to soothe executives back to sleep.

It’s a system of a thousand tiny linguistic cuts.

Finding the Human Underneath

Each time we “circle back” instead of “decide,” or “reach out” instead of “ask,” or “unpack” an issue instead of “analyzing” it, we bleed a little bit of clarity. We trade precision for palatability. After a while, the organization is so anemic it can’t make a decisive move. It just… aligns. And synergizes. And operationalizes itself into a slow, quiet irrelevance.

A few years ago, a friend of mine going through a messy business partnership breakup did something odd. He hired a handwriting analyst. Her name was Reese K.-H., and she charged a startling $676 an hour to look at squiggles on a page. I was deeply skeptical. It seemed like borderline mysticism, a high-priced parlor trick. He showed me her report, 26 pages of dense analysis on his business partner’s signature. Reese wrote about pressure and spacing, about the t-bar crossing and the loop of the ‘g’. She claimed his partner’s light, upward-slanting script revealed an avoidance of conflict and a tendency to make promises he couldn’t ground in reality.

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“This isn’t a person who lies,” she explained over the phone to him. “This is a person whose reality is aspirational.”

— Reese K.-H., Handwriting Analyst

At the time, I thought it was nonsense. But every one of her 6 predictions came true. The partner vanished when real financial pressure mounted, leaving a trail of well-intentioned but empty promises.

What does a handwriting analyst have to do with corporate jargon? Everything. Reese’s work was about finding the human being underneath the words. The pressure of the pen revealed commitment. The consistency of the slant showed emotional state. The very form of the letters was a data point about the soul of the writer. Corporate language is the exact opposite. It’s a deliberate attempt to erase the human, to remove all the messy, telling signals of authentic communication. It is language with no pressure, no slant, no soul. It’s the Times New Roman of human interaction-perfectly formed, universally legible, and utterly devoid of personality. It is the signature of a committee, written by no one and for no one.

This drive for sterile, risk-free communication has infected every corner of the business world, especially in spaces where trust is paramount. You see it everywhere, from opaque financial products to vague wellness claims. The companies that are actually building loyalty are the ones running in the opposite direction. They use simple, direct language because their products and services can stand on their own. They don’t need to hide behind a smokescreen of synergy. The ones that succeed, whether they’re developing enterprise software or selling Metabolism and health supplements, understand that clarity is the ultimate sign of respect for your customer. You don’t need to “ideate a wellness journey” for them; you just need to tell them what’s in the bottle and what it does.

The Real Mission

I was on a project once where we spent 46 hours-I counted-in a series of meetings to define our “core mission pillars.” The final statement, crafted by a committee of 6 people, was a 236-word paragraph of such profound emptiness that it could be hung in a modern art museum. It mentioned “empowerment,” “innovation,” “stakeholder-centric solutions,” and “future-forward paradigms.” It was a masterpiece of saying nothing. The real mission, which everyone knew but no one dared say, was

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“Let’s try not to go bankrupt this year.”

— The Unspoken Truth

But that was too real, too vulnerable. It had too much pressure and a downward slant.

I think the wrong number call I got this morning at 5:06 AM was clearer. A man with a gravelly voice just said, “Is he there?” and when I said he had the wrong number, he grunted and hung up. It was abrupt and a little jarring, but I understood it perfectly. I knew what he wanted, and I knew he didn’t get it. There was no synergy. No leveraging. No moving forward. It was just a raw, unadorned, and wonderfully clear piece of human communication. We’ve built entire corporate empires on language that is less clear than a 5 AM wrong number.