In the test these weren't coded language, they were randomly generated phrases. The finding is that the people who don't know how to decipher the code are easily impressed by it and have poor analytical skills.
> mortified to show off a $10,000 watch, but excitedly tell you about their $100,000 kitchen remodel filled with 100-mile diet cookbooks and single-origin Japanese knives, or their 6-month work sabbatical they spent powerlifting. This is a group of people where a Subaru is a higher-status car than a Cadillac, but the highest status car is none.
> “Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” said Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.”
I'm taking issue with "semantically empty" and saying they're actually semantically rich, but they are coded signals. Coded signals become increasingly indistinguishable from noise.
But they're not semantically rich. People who speak the code aren't doing it to more efficiently communicate, such that a long and complicated message can be expressed quickly. They are taking a short simple message, stripping away all the details, then padding it such that it becomes more verbose and vapid. This makes the real message harder to decipher for the uninitiated, it removes information even for those who understand the code, and it serves as a display for people who appreciate the flourish. There may still be some meaning left, but it's semantically emptier.
Further much of it is not even code. Examples like the microsoft letter are clearly a performative act to soften the blow of bad news. No one in the know is reading such an email to discern some hidden message; it's written to not be read.
I think it's more like that you are signalling by your use of HTTPS at all, and the packet body itself is encrypted nonsense.
Hiding information in the protocol layer while the bulk content that is "supposed" to contain the meaning is present but actually meaningless. Or for a physical analogy the payload of the envelope vis a decoy and the real information is hidden in the way the flap is sealed.
Yes, taking 16 kb to transmit what could have been transmitted in 1 kb with the express purpose of making communication more difficult. That is what semantically emptier means.
I use HTTPS because it makes my packets “more retarded” than the HTTP version of those packets to anybody without the session key to decrypt the “retarded nonsense”.
That’s literally the whole point of encryption:
Your message becomes unintelligible to those who aren’t able to decode the content.
Except encryption isn’t made to protect enlightened few from stupid masses and their “poor” understanding. If you have something secret to say to other managers then just send an email to a mailing list. Assuming that only you and your clique understand the message directed at specific people is an insult to people around you.
It's called elite maintenance of the social class hierarchy. They can't help it, it's all they know. The thing that bugs me is it should be on us working stiffs to divest them of these habits. You can only lead a horse to water, however...
> Eventually they figured out that language served a different
purpose inside the bond market than it did in the outside world. Bond market
terminology was designed less to convey meaning than to bewilder outsiders.
Overpriced bonds were not "expensive" overpriced bonds were "rich," which
almost made them sound like something you should buy. The floors of
subprime mortgage bonds were not called floors--or anything else that might
lead the bond buyer to form any sort of concrete image in his mind--but
tranches. The bottom tranche--the risky ground floor--was not called the
ground floor but the mezzanine, or the mezz, which made it sound less like a
dangerous investment and more like a highly prized seat in a domed stadium.
A CDO composed of nothing but the riskiest, mezzanine layer of subprime
mortgages was not called a subprime-backed CDO but a "structured finance
CDO." "There was so much confusion about the different terms," said Charlie.
"In the course of trying to figure it out, we realize that there's a reason why it doesn't quite make sense to us. It's because it doesn't quite make sense."
In some cases, sure, they're semantically rich, but the result here is that in some cases it doesn't matter whether they are or not, that some people can't tell. That can still be true even if corporate jargon originated and is sometimes still used for rational-ish reasons.
I'm always reminded of Asimov's Lord Dorwin: "[the linguistic analyst] after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications—in short all the goo and dribble—he found he had nothing left. Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn’t say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed."
yeah, this is frankly isn't really showing what people think it's showing. The "not bullshit" examples are all manager-speak and coded phrases like
"We plan to right-size our manufacturing operations to align to the new
strategy and take advantage of integration opportunities."
What the study actually shows is that less skilled people find it harder to distinguish this sort of way of saying jobs are being lost or puffery about "we have permission from the market to be a world class, tier one partner" from generated manager speak that's incoherent or mixes the metaphors up like "covering all bases of the low hanging fruit" or "drilling down one more click on people"). Probably because those less skilled people have poorer reading comprehension in general and typically less exposure to corporate environments.
Or that those “nonsense” phrases are not actually nonsense when spoken by a manager.
The conclusion they’re nonsense comes from the random generation and the technical perspective on semantics; but it’s entirely possible they’re generating phrases that do have semantic meaning when said by a manager… and hence their whole study is flawed.
They quietly assume their conclusion, when assuming their generated phrases are vacuous rather than contain coded semantic content.
Jesus bro it looks like shit, it smells like shit, it has the same texture – it is shit, you can’t convince me it is a chocolate. The purpose of the corpo speak is to inflate manager ego and fool smooth brains.
