Consider the denizens of the office — those figures hunched over their desks typing, pinging, barking into phones, scarfing down salads, sometimes closing the loop, always circling back. They’d love to touch base. They’ll do a deep dive, if it moves the needle.
Office lingo signals affiliation with an in-group. But that isn’t its only function. “Corporate language serves the purpose of papering over the messiness of being a person with emotions and contradictory impulses,” said Aparna Nancherla, a comedian who played a human resources representative on the Comedy Central show “Corporate.”
During the pandemic, Ms. Nancherla noted, as lives and routines were upended, that sleek language didn’t always meet the demands of the moment. “Corporate life is so tied to time and efficiency, and none of that felt like it mattered anymore,” she continued. “It felt like playacting, like keeping up this charade.”
Still, Ms. Nancherla, like millions of other Americans, found herself going through the motions: sending Google calendar invitations, logging onto video calls, adjusting her ring light as the world fell to pieces. New phrases cropped up to label those jarring experiences. There was social distancing, Covidiot, Zoom fatigue. Lexicographers took note of that gloomy vocabulary. In 2020, the digital word of the year was doomscrolling, according to the American Dialect Society. In 2021, burnout made Dictionary.com’s shortlist.
Employers relied on jargon more than ever, according to André Spicer, a professor at Bayes Business School, City, University of London, because the usual tools they had for building workplace community had disappeared. That meant inventing fresh terms as well as leaning on the classics, like disruption and road map. Then there were oldies that got an update. “I hope this finds you well” gained the addendum, “in these trying and unprecedented times.”
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