It’s Pronounced ‘Garbahj'

Garbage language is the poli-talk of organizations, and its sole purpose is to fill up space. It’s clear that if we all agreed to speak the language of normal language, we could cut the workday in half.

The only beauty in talking in garbage-laden gobbledegooks — Think parallel pathing. Think synergistic dominance — is that, like any good myth, like any good thing that isn’t really real, these phrases come from nowhere and are immediately embraced by everyone.

They’re a mash-up of business lingo with sports and war metaphors, creating an environment where no one knows what anyone is saying while everyone is simultaneously convinced they’re the only ones who don’t know what everyone else is saying.

We can trace garbage language way back to our favorite Scientific Management gasbag, Freddy Taylor, when he started talking about humans in terms of manufacturing in the ‘20s — Think output. Think productive capacity — to when in the '50s and '60s attention-starved workers were milled through employee appreciation programs — Think growth. Think self-actualization — to the Wall Street language of the ‘80s — Think leverage. Think value-add — and the big tech and gaming analogizing of today — Think bandwidth. Think hack. Think leveling-up.

Garbage language is a good descriptor because it’s what we make without thinking, but it’s also not a good descriptor because garbage language is very subtly purposeful. It invades the ways we think about our jobs and molds our identities as employees. The words provide a cover for all the things we’re not doing.

They also give us necessary blinders to persuade us into thinking our jobs are more interesting than they are. Accepting a language that connects you to the perceived worthiness of a corporate super organism is a self-marketing tool that helps sell the idea of our jobs back to us. They’re scammy in nature, and thousands of companies have tricked us into believing that merely spouting multisyllabic nonsense puts us in an ideological position.

A phrase may pop into our head that we haven’t heard in years — Think holistic road map — and we’ll feel like someone just told us that we ate a bowl of soup containing a booger. We’re overcome with aversion, but it’s too late to do anything.

These words worm their way in our heads and can’t be removed, but the real continued threat, the reason garbage language is not just annoying but malevolent, is that it confirms delusion as an asset in the workplace.