Words, Oh How You Have Bedeviled Me: A Field Guide to Why We Speak the Way We Do at Work

Originally published on LinkedIn.

Here is the problem we need to solve: Misaligned stakeholder ecosystems consistently generate competing deliverables without a single source of truth. The real north star isn't ideating louder — it's socializing a tick tock that drives synergy and a roadmap to get to 1+1=3. Ideating in unison with continuous circle-backs to key stakeholders is causing misalignment.

Nobody quite knows what that means, including the person who said it.

Lily Tomlin had a line for this. Reality is nothing but a collective hunch. Get a group of people to agree on something, and the agreement becomes the thing. But what happens when a different group of people agreed on something, and a new group has no idea what that thing is?

In 1956, Zenith released a remote control called the Space Command. When you pressed a button, it made an audible click. Nobody called it a Space Command. They called it a clicker. The mechanism changed, the clicking stopped, but the name didn't. My father called it a clicker. I grew up calling it a clicker. Everyone around my age knows what a clicker is. My children, although reluctantly, still call it a clicker. The collective hunch became reality for enough people that the meaning was understood and became the thing's name (sorry Space Command).

We still dial numbers on phones with no dials. We hang up without hanging anything. We CC people on emails without carbon paper, which most people under forty have never seen. These are inherited words — built by one group, passed to another, and kept because they still work.

Now consider the plumber and the electrician. Inside their trade, they use precise language most people don't understand — PSI, load calc, neutral bond. But when they talk to each other or to a homeowner, they switch to good old English. The toilet flushes. The lights come on. The plug works. Everyone understands those words before the conversation even starts.

The linguist Herbert Clark spent his career studying this. He called it common ground. People don't communicate by transferring information from one brain to another — they jointly build a shared pool of meaning, sentence by sentence. The plumber and the electrician have common ground with the homeowner before anyone walks onto the site, and they use it without thinking.

We seem to have decided to do something else at work. Corporate speak. Every organization develops its own dialect — close enough to English to sound familiar but not shared enough to mean the same thing to everyone. A leadership team agrees on a plan, everyone nods, the meeting ends on time, and people go back to their desks and execute different versions of what just got agreed to. Not because anyone is careless. Not because anyone is acting in bad faith. Because we are missing enough of a shared pool of meaning that it becomes, well, nonsense.

To add to the mix everyone is also carrying the corporate dialect from their last job, and the one before that, while trying to figure out which words mean what here. Each dialect is similar enough to the next that we keep going. Different enough that anyone who doesn't speak a corporate dialect thinks you have gone insane. Or, if you want to understand that in corporate speak: we're leaning into an agile mindset and operationalizing outside the traditional guardrails. It's a paradigm shift, frankly.

We seem to carry corporate language like a badge of honor into every room and expect it to hold meaning across teams, levels, and contexts. It doesn't.

A lot of corporate communication is the equivalent of standing in a foreign country and saying the same English sentence louder, hoping VOLUME WILL HELP THEM UNDERSTAND. It never worked. Just ask the waiter in that divine little place just outside of Rome.

Try saying this to your child: we need to double click on our nutritional bandwidth and operationalize a scalable lunch deliverable. The kid wouldn't be confused. The kid would assume something had gone seriously wrong.

So what would happen if we just said what we meant? We need to align becomes I disagree. Let's circle back becomes not now. Ambiguity across key stakeholders becomes I don't know. The meeting gets shorter, and for once everyone leaves with the same picture.

The tool I built, CorpToSpeak , translates corporate language back into plain English (or vice versa for the uninitiated). People laugh when they use it — sadly because it's relatable.

It shouldn't need to exist.

(For the record — I'm not bitter. Just trying to save time. And reduce the gobbledygook.)

All my references to English are from corporate life. Curious to hear what corporate dialects sound like in other parts of the world — DM or drop them in the comments per favore.

If this is interesting and you want to dig in: — Lily Tomlin's line is from The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1985), written by Jane Wagner. — Herbert Clark's work on common ground: Using Language (Cambridge University Press, 1996).