6) Jargon

The other night I was telling Eric a story about my day, when he stopped me mid-sentence. "You're such an account person," he said, calling out my use of the word "topline" in my recounting of what I ate for breakfast (or something equally mundane). After almost two years of working in account management, it finally happened - the management jargon I unconsciously picked up was now invading my after hours speech.

For those unfamiliar with MBA-speak, here's a crash course. Managers don't just make phone calls. They jump on them as if they're grabbing that last seat on a roller coaster. It implies urgency, a spur-of-the-moment excitement to dial in to a conference call. And we don't simply use things to our advantage. We make like Archimedes and leverage them (usually assets). And you better hope that the deliverables coming down the pipe are buttoned up by EOD when we touch base with the client.

Where did this now overused and overvalued jargon come from? Can we ever pin point its origin? By definition, it takes a village to define lingo. Too bad - I'd love to give credit to the first person who realized that "we'll circle back" was a great way to end a conversation without actually committing to a course of action.

The irony of jargon is that while it provides a particular group its own technical terminology (i.e. we're all in the know because we collectively understand what these phrases mean), it also turns said group into a cliché. When it seeps into our non-professional conversations, we become defined by our jargon. When we hear, "You're such a [insert profession here]," we've been pigeonholed by our own words.