I couldn’t help chuckling to myself. Well, maybe it wasn’t so much to myself, because Helen saw my stifled laughter, smiled and asked, “What’s funny?”
“I thought about how business life was thirty years ago and imagined being in a meeting where someone said what you just did,” I explained. “They would have no clue what you were talking about and they’d probably think you needed institutionalization!”
“Well, I probably need institutionalization anyway!” said Helen.
So much of our language is made up of words that come to us through the dramatically accelerated technological advancements that affect our daily lives. Language is alive, as any linguist or student of language evolution will tell you. It changes over time, in both syntax as well as lexicon, based on the needs of the prevalent human culture at the moment. Business language is probably one of the most active mutation “sites” within the broader language usage. Teenage communication is another. From these two cauldrons of language change we have “meeting wizard” and “twitter”. We have “webmaster” and the plethora of expressionistic, condensed acronyms and emoticons found in the teenager’s private language of Textese: “OMG”, “CUL8TR”, “ ; ) ”. And when I wrote “emoticons”, the spell-checker didn’t notice at all! When was this word created? Couldn’t be more than ten years ago. Now it’s in the cyber-dictionary, all official and proud of it’s acceptance into the community of upstanding, commonly used words that make up our current language.
In business, knowledge of the right terms can be a major hurdle for acceptance into a group of people who exchange powerful information and negotiate important economic relationships. If you are attempting to raise money for a biotech company, and you don’t know the terms for the various structures of investing, you won’t get a positive response from possible financiers. The terms translate to simple concepts which anyone can learn in a few minutes, if they are even slightly educated in business. They are not complex. But the use of specialized terms gives the conversation a mysterious tone and makes the content inaccessible to the intelligent, yet ignorant participant in the discussion. Another example is found within companies. There are whole languages that develop inside an organization, often around the use of acronyms. The military and its vendors are famous for it. The acronyms are useful, in that they condense the amount of time it takes to communicate within the organization. If every acronym was replaced by the words it represents, that alone would extend the amount of time necessary to talk to each other by a factor of two or three. This is the same dynamic that caused the creation of contractions in general language usage. If the words occur together often, condensing them into one word just saves time. Language efficiency has found its most condensed version in texting and twittering. Humans like to be efficient. Or another way to say it is that humans are lazy by nature. We, like water, find the path of least resistance to our preferred level of inactivity.
The process of language evolution through specialized terminology can be hilarious as well. In business, the ancient phrase for testing an idea was, “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it.”, which was shortened to, “Let’s run it up the flag pole.” After generations of repetition and unintentional aberration, this time-honored phrase was transformed. One day, in a meeting with another very experienced business person, I heard this: “Let’s push it through the puppy.” His intention was the same as the phrase involving the flag and saluting. How he came to understand the puppy reference as a means of describing idea evaluation was a mystery to me. And to him. I asked him where he heard that phrase and he couldn’t tell me. I asked him how long he had been using it, and he said years. Imagine how many of his listeners had thought to themselves, “What the hell does THAT mean?? And what a terrible thing to do to a puppy!”
No stranger to the use of new language myself, I was smacked in the face with my own easy acceptance of inane, specialized language. I was talking with someone and said, “This experience will result in new learnings.” He looked at me blankly and asked, “What’s a ‘learning’? Is that like a lesson?” I was amazed at how easily I had said a non-word. It came from being part of another organization where the word was commonly applied, and which was a cultural identifier within that organization. It had meaning within the context of a particular group of people, thereby creating interpersonal bonds simply by virtue of its usage. And that is the underlying “learning” of this example: the use of specialized language within a group of people creates a cultural bond that helps to define the group, separate it from other groups and increase the feelings of reciprocity that must exist to cause people to contribute to each other’s well-being. That is a critical element of effective group effort towards achieving desired results.
We can look at the creation and use of specialized language with humor and understanding, if we realize that language is just as alive as the people who use it, and has an extremely important contribution to make to human endeavors. But I still can’t quite believe all the things I hear. And say.