The origins of the corporate jargon we all love to hate

Let’s talk about jargon.

Communicators are in the peculiar position of needing to understand people at every level of an organization and to be understood by them, as well as by their audiences, and the same phrase can mean one thing to insiders and something else to everyone else. In other words, it may not be the Swiss Army knife you think it is.

In many cases jargon makes a message less plainspoken and literal, and therefore harder for your average person to follow. At worst, its metaphorical indirectness can even be exclusionary. And when your job is to explain an idea, earn trust or get people to act, too much can leave readers decoding the language — or worse, rolling their eyes — instead of absorbing the message.

As a result, PR and comms pros frequently have to train themselves not to overindex (oops, there I go) on the corporate jargon that their executive teams and peers may tend to favor.

That said, jargon has its place. Every profession has its shorthand. We all use jargon, and recognizing it gives us more choice about when it helps and when it gets in the way.

Note: A while ago, I, PR Daily’s resident etymology dweeb who also writes and has a podcast about this stuff, covered the origin of the godmother of all corporate jargon terms, synergy, so we won’t explore that one, but you’re welcome to read more about it. I’ve also done “authenticity” and other terms heard around the office, such as scuttlebutt.

The etymology of jargon

For today’s lesson, let’s start with the word itself. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest definitions for jargon (c. 14th century) include “the inarticulate utterance of birds” and “unintelligible or meaningless talk or writing,” as of chatty birds, and it’s supposedly intended to echo that avian twittering.

The word wryly took on its current meaning — that is, the terminology unique to a sect or profession — in the 1650s due to the fact that such speech is unintelligible to outsiders.

A similar word, jargle, is recorded in French and English as a verb meaning “chatter” or, once again, “warble like a bird.” (Obviously we should revive that one as the verb form of jargon because it’s great.)

In the early 2000s there are several tongue-in-cheek instances of the word “jargonaut” used to refer to someone who uses too much jargon. The latter half is, predictably, a punny callback to the Argonauts (sailors on the Argo) of Greek mythology who quested for the Golden Fleece with Jason.

Jargon is, of course, not exclusive to the corporate world. Medicine, law and theater all have their own forms of jargon. And while “legalese” often oozes into the corporate world, businessfolk are often associated with their own variety of jargon. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Common corporate jargon terms, decoded

A stakeholder, as you may imagine, is not someone prepared to stake a vampire or pitch a tent but someone in gambling who holds the stakes or bets in a wager. The term was recorded as early as the 18th century. By the 1960s, “stakeholder” was adapted in business to mean anyone with an interest in the outcomes of an organization, from investors to employees, suggesting that they have something valuable “at stake” in the business’s performance.

Bandwidth was pretty straightforward in the 1800s: It was the width of a band, such as a material or a color. Today’s sense comes from its use for radios and other electronics in the 1930s; here, it was first, and still is, a word for the amount of data that can be transmitted in a given time frame. In this context, a “band” is a range of radio frequencies used to transmit data over a network. By the 1990s, corporate culture had adopted it to mean a person’s mental or physical capacity to handle more work.

Corner the market originated in the early 1800s and describes when someone buys enough of a commodity or stock to control its price and manipulate the market. The term uses the word “corner” in the sense of “driving would-be buyers into a corner,” so they have no choice but to purchase from one brand or organization.

What might corner the market? An 800-pound gorilla. In corporate worlds (and also in military and political environments), an 800-pound gorilla is an entity with a majority share of a market, one its competitors don’t stand a chance against. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, for example, are such large entities that all other soda brands are often seen as independent or so-called challenger brands. The term comes from a joke:

1. Where does an 800-pound gorilla sit?
   A. Anywhere it wants to.

The term is also often tossed around as a word for a really big idea or product launch that a company hopes will “corner the market” — a cutting-edge idea, perhaps.

Speaking of which, cutting edge has been around in its most literal sense, as a word for a sharp edge of a weapon, since the 1500s. But the adjective phrasal sense we see in the tech industry was preceded by a similar use in sports, where the cutting edge was the ability of a team to attack in a decisive and uncompromising way because of an advantage like possession of a ball. The business world picked it up for advancements and innovations in the 1950s, and “bleeding edge” appeared in the 1980s as a more visceral variation.

And, in fact, many corporate jargon terms are sports-inspired. Plenty are obviously so, and they also have plenty of applications beyond the corporate world, though they tend to appear frequently in business environments: drop the ball (fail to complete something or keep a process going), in the ballpark (approximately), blindsided (stunned by an unexpected occurrence) and touch base (check in briefly, as if touching a base in baseball).

But what’s your wheelhouse? In baseball, a wheelhouse is “a hitter’s power zone,” and that, in turn, is a comparison to the covering over the steering wheel of a steamboat.

On the sillier side, the term “spam” for unwanted mass email or messages (or “spamming” in the same sense) has nothing to do with its culinary namesake—well, almost. It originated from a Monty Python sketch where “SPAM” (the canned meat) is repeated ad nauseam on a restaurant menu, leading to an overabundance of the word. This repetition became synonymous with an excessive barrage of messages, thus “spamming” your inbox.

And who doesn’t love a little swag from a conference or a brand activation? This word for branded T-shirts, tote bags and the like dates back to the 1800s, when it first meant “stolen goods” or “loot.” Swag was once a verb meaning “to sway,” which also gave us — or really gave Shakespeare, in whose works this term first appears — the word “swagger.” All of the above are thought to come from the Old Norse sveggja, meaning “to swing” or “move heavily,” referring to the way a thief might strut or lug their stolen goods. Turns out we’re all making off like thieves with those branded goodies.

In any case, as key stakeholders in reading this article, it’s incumbent upon you to leverage jargon and gauge whether these terms are a net value-add to your lexical toolbox. Are they scalable? Are they 800-pound gorillas? We’ll circle back to review your core competencies, and if you excel, maybe we’ll hit you with some journalism jargon next time.

Jess Zafarris is editor-at-large for Ragan and PR Daily.