25 Words That Should Be Banned
How Corporatespeak Poisoned Conversation
Burn ’em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our official slogan.
—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Above: A controlled burn of linguistic kindling.
A few weeks back, I wrote a piece on fifty words that deserve more use—a small attempt to widen our verbal aperture, to give language back some of its lost color and texture.
This is the opposite essay.
This is the bonfire into which these hard, ugly, heretical words ought be cast.
Inspired in part by some particularly pernicious LinkedIn offenders—linguistic crimes so bloodless and airless they could only have been birthed inside an open-plan office with drop ceilings and bad coffee—I’ve come to believe that certain words not only muddy thought, but actively poison it.
I’m all for the free expression of good ideas. I am NOT for words that take polychromatic, living ideas and force them into monochromatic, sterile containers.
Language should enlarge and enliven us. These words shrink us. They turn conversation into compliance, wit into water-cooler banter, and writing into paperwork.
Somewhere along the way, business language escaped the office and colonized the rest of life.
A human became a user.
A person became a consumer.
A relationship became engagement.
A conversation became content.
The world became one big product, and we became walking feature requests.
This linguistic drift has gone on for far too long. It leads to an existence that is sedated, unexamined, and deeply corrosive.
The following words neither describe reality nor enhance our perception of it. Instead, they replace it with a cheaper abstraction and push us farther back into Plato’s cave. They let us talk around meaning without ever touching it.
As such, they should be cast into the fires of hell. Ne’er to be spake or heard, scrawled or read ever again.
User
Content
Engagement
Leverage
Synergy
Impact
Alignment
Stakeholder
Framework
Ecosystem
Scalable
Agile
Streamline
Frictionless
Platform
Disruption
Disruptive
Innovation
Innovative
Utilize
Enable
Monetize
Optimize
Narrative
May these words lose their power.
May they dry up on the tongue and rot on the page.
May those tempted to use them feel, for a brief and merciful moment, the poverty of the thought they were about to conceal.
And may we, once again, risk saying what we actually mean like beings made of flesh and bone and blood were meant to.
Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.
If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on X.
With sincere gratitude,
Tom
Good one, Tom.
Good read. Ann
May I suggest an indefinite pause for "iconic"? May I also refer all and sundry offenders to "Politics and the English Language", George Orwell's always-pertinent essay?