Synergy. Bandwidth. Circle back. Move the needle. Corporate America has built an entire vocabulary out of saying nothing specifically, and somehow calls that communication. Here’s what it’s actually doing. It’s squeezing every bit of diversity out of how people talk, one meeting at a time, like wringing a dirty rag until nothing distinctive comes out the other end. The theory, if you asked leadership, is that a shared language helps us all understand each other better. If we all talk the same, we’ll finally connect.
I call BS. Here’s why.
None of the phrases above say anything a plain sentence couldn’t say better. Nobody who says “let’s circle back” is communicating more clearly than someone who just says “I’ll email you Thursday.” The point was never clarity. The point is sounding like everyone else in the room, using the same ten interchangeable phrases so nobody’s voice stands out enough to get noticed for the wrong reasons.
Then there’s the phrases built to punish directness. “Let’s take this offline.” “I want to be respectful of everyone’s time.” “Not the hill I’d die on.” These exist to shut down bluntness and flatten every conversation into the same unbothered, low-temperature register. That register gets coded as professional. Meanwhile, a direct, plainspoken Black woman who says “that’s unclear, let’s make sure we use the correct phraseology in our effort to actually solve this” gets coded as aggressive, difficult, not a culture fit, for saying the exact same thing the room already agreed with, just without the corporate cushioning wrapped around it. Same content. Different reception, entirely based on whose mouth it came out of and how it was dressed.
And then there’s the vagueness that gets rewarded outright. “Move the needle.” “Drive impact.” “Thought leadership.” None of it means anything specific, and that’s the whole feature. I asked a salesperson recently what he meant by being strategic. Maybe I’ll get an actual answer sometime next week, because all he gave me in the moment was more buzzwords stacked on top of the original buzzword. Lol. Smh. Somebody fluent in this dialect can talk for ten minutes, say absolutely nothing, and walk away praised for their executive presence. Meanwhile the person who just states the actual number, names the actual problem, and offers the actual fix, gets told they need more polish. Vagueness reads as leadership. Precision reads as junior.
And that gap isn’t just about tone, it’s about who gets rewarded for how little. Being mediocre is a legitimate path to promotion in this country, if you’re white. As Black folks, we have to be the best who ever did it just to get considered, and even then, the raise that follows still comes in smaller. Black women currently earn 65 cents for every dollar a white man makes, which means we work well into the following year, Black Women’s Equal Pay Day landed on July 21 this year, just to catch up to what he already earned by December. That is not a skills gap. That is a rulebook with two different sets of print, one regular size and one so small you need a microscope, depending on who’s reading it.
Look at how differently scrutiny gets applied at the very top. If Barack Obama had three baby mommas and a documented history of affairs with a porn star and a Playboy model, would he have made it to the Senate, let alone the presidency? Absolutely not, and everybody reading this knows it without me having to spell out why. The rules were never the same, and corporate speak is just one more version of the same rule, dressed up as order and propriety instead of what it actually is.
So when leadership says this shared vocabulary helps us understand each other better, I call BS, because sameness of language was never actually the goal for us. If it were, natural hair wouldn’t have needed a federal law just to be protected on the job, and AAVE wouldn’t still get quietly flagged as unprofessional coming out of our mouths while the exact same phrasing gets called edgy and with it coming out of theirs. What’s unprofessional in my mouth is apparently a personality trait in a white colleague’s, and I have corrected that colleague more times than I can count for borrowing our version of speech and calling it their own style. And don’t call me girlfriend while you’re doing it. We all know that singsongy voice white women slip into when they’re mimicking AAVE, and it’s exhausting every single time. Ugh. The real goal of buzzword culture is the same as every assimilation demand that came before it. Squeeze out anything that reads as different when we do it, then reward whoever performs sameness, or performs us, most convincingly, blackface with better manners, if we’re being honest about what that actually is.
I’m fussing in this one, y’all, because I’m tired. Tired of being the only one in the room. Tired of people telling us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps like hard work alone was ever going to fix a system built to keep the boots out of reach. Ms. Lauryn Hill said it best on “Forgive Them Father,” why Black folks gotta be the ones who settle. Eh.
What’s the corporate phrase that makes you want to scream every time you hear it? Tell me in the comments.
