Should we use jargon? AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Learning English For Work
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Episode: Should we use jargon?
Author: BBC News
Duration: 00:09:44
Episode Shownotes
Lots of people find jargon annoying. Is it useful in the workplace? Pippa and Phil talk about when to use jargon and when to avoid it, with help from journalist Anna Maloney, Anne Curzan from the University of Michigan and John Fiset from St Mary's University in Nova Scotia, Canada.Listen
to Business Daily on jargon here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct5znhFind a full transcript for this episode and more programmes to help you with your English at: ``https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish`/english/features/business-jargon/241216` FIND BBC LEARNING ENGLISH HERE: Visit our website ✔️ https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish Follow us ✔️ https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/followus SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER: ✔️ https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/newsletters LIKE PODCASTS? Try some of our other popular podcasts including: ✔️ 6 Minute English ✔️ Learning English from the News ✔️ Learning English Stories They're all available by searching in your podcast app.
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_03
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Hello and welcome to Learning English for Work and our special series all about jargon. I'm Phil.
00:00:13 Speaker_07
And I'm Pippa. In this series we've been talking about some of the strange words and phrases we use at work – business jargon.
00:00:21 Speaker_03
As we've mentioned in the series, lots of people find jargon annoying or difficult to understand. So today we're going to look more at why we use jargon and whether it's helpful in our working lives.
00:00:34 Speaker_07
Find a transcript for this episode to read along on our website bbclearningenglish.com.
00:00:48 Speaker_03
Now, earlier this year we made a programme all about jargon with our colleagues at Business Daily, a BBC World Service business series. Their reporter, Ed Butler, spoke to Anna Maloney, a journalist at the London financial newspaper, City AM.
00:01:03 Speaker_03
And Anna's been writing a new column, highlighting a different piece of corporate jargon each week.
00:01:10 Speaker_02
So, Anna, let's just pick up the paper.
00:01:12 Speaker_08
Yeah.
00:01:15 Speaker_02
So, what have we got here?
00:01:16 Speaker_08
today we're highlighting stakeholder, which I think is a particularly insidious one.
00:01:22 Speaker_07
Anna's jargon of the week is stakeholder. Now, this means anyone who's involved in a company and has an interest in it being successful.
00:01:32 Speaker_07
So employees are stakeholders, but also the people who own the company are stakeholders, the customers, the clients, all of those kinds of people. But Anna says the word stakeholder has become jargon.
00:01:44 Speaker_07
She calls it insidious, which means it is gradually causing harm.
00:01:49 Speaker_08
Most often when you're referring to a stakeholder, I think people usually are referring to themselves. You know, we need to consider key stakeholders in this decision for everyone to come back in the office five days a week.
00:02:00 Speaker_08
What that means is, well, I've grown rather accustomed to my Friday morning yoga and I don't want to be back in the office.
00:02:07 Speaker_02
Exactly. You've been doing this column for nine months, right?
00:02:10 Speaker_08
Yes.
00:02:10 Speaker_02
How do people respond to it, your readers?
00:02:13 Speaker_08
This has been one feature that our readers have really engaged with. They're our biggest culprits, but also the biggest haters.
00:02:20 Speaker_08
And I think this is a key feature, you know, we all love to hate it, but statistically, you know, some of us are also, we're using it every day.
00:02:28 Speaker_03
Anna says that readers of the newspaper really enjoy the column, but those readers are the same people who use the jargon Anna writes about all the time at work.
00:02:38 Speaker_03
So we've got here people are complaining about this jargon, but actually they're the ones who use it.
00:02:43 Speaker_07
Yes, I think we're all guilty of that, Phil. So often we've talked about bits of jargon in this series that we find annoying, but we also use them. And sometimes you actually hear someone complaining about jargon or a certain phrase they don't like.
00:02:58 Speaker_07
And then they use a load of jargon just to talk about what they don't like about it. So it's everywhere. It's kind of part of our everyday language at work.
00:03:12 Speaker_07
Our colleagues at Business Daily asked BBC World Service listeners on Facebook about business jargon and lots of people mentioned being frustrated by jargon or hearing it too much at work. Let's look at a few examples.
00:03:26 Speaker_03
OK, so we had deep dive, which is where you look at something in detail.
00:03:31 Speaker_07
Yeah, we had cascade. Somebody suggested this. This is where you pass on information. So somebody at the top of the organisation sends it to a few people and then they cascade it.
00:03:42 Speaker_07
They send it to their employees and down the chain of command, as it were.
00:03:46 Speaker_03
And then you have synergy, which is when everyone is working well together, possibly because the information has been well cascaded to them. And it's this idea that working together is more powerful than everyone working on their own.
00:04:01 Speaker_07
And interestingly, some commenters said that they're now retired, but reading all the examples on the Facebook post made them feel quite stressed.
00:04:09 Speaker_07
So maybe part of why we dislike this language is because it reminds us of work and any stress associated with the world of work.
00:04:17 Speaker_03
So another common criticism of jargon is that it's vague, so it's difficult to know for sure what someone's talking about.
00:04:24 Speaker_07
Yeah, and I spoke to Jon Fossette, who is an expert in workplace culture and language dynamics from St Mary's University in Nova Scotia in Canada. And Jon believes that some jargon used by businesses is deliberately difficult to understand.
00:04:40 Speaker_00
One of the interesting things about this corporate jargon or corporate corporateese or however you want to say it, is A lot of the time when that's used, it's to remove meaning. For example, like, you're being fired.
00:04:54 Speaker_00
No, we're having a corporate downsizing or a rightsizing now. That's how they're using these terms. So it's, again, removing some of the pain, removing some of the meaning behind things to seem innocuous.
00:05:06 Speaker_00
A lot of these terms are meant to kind of mask the real intent behind some of the decisions that are being made. And for that matter, make people sound a little smarter than they are.
00:05:19 Speaker_03
John is concerned that people are using corporateese, that's corporate language, to make what they're saying seem innocuous or harmless.
00:05:30 Speaker_07
Yes, and we talked about this in our series Office English. We mentioned some of the language used at work to talk about bad news and it's not always clear.
00:05:40 Speaker_03
So John mentioned downsizing and rightsizing. People don't like these terms, but also people don't like losing their jobs. It's a difficult thing for us to talk about.
00:05:51 Speaker_07
So I spoke to Anne Curzon, Professor of English Language at the University of Michigan, who thinks that sometimes we love to hate jargon just a bit too much.
00:06:02 Speaker_01
One of the things that you see is that there is language that used to be considered jargon that now we don't even notice. And a great example of that is the verb finalise, which in the late 1960s was seen as bureaucratic jargon.
00:06:20 Speaker_01
It was criticized and really quite soundly disliked. And over time, over the past few decades, the criticism has declined.
00:06:31 Speaker_01
And at this point, when I tell people that that verb used to be considered jargon, they're often surprised because it doesn't feel jargony at all, but incentivize feels very jargony.
00:06:46 Speaker_03
Ann says we often find new words annoying at work, but over time they become normal.
00:06:53 Speaker_07
Yeah, and this is true of other language change too.
00:06:56 Speaker_07
For example, lots of people use new words and phrases on social media and some people find this annoying or say that the new expressions aren't proper English, but usually we get used to them over time.
00:07:08 Speaker_03
Yes, new language does often get criticised.
00:07:12 Speaker_07
And Anne also thinks that our dislike of business jargon in particular could demonstrate what we think about business more generally.
00:07:20 Speaker_01
Honestly, I think there may also be a deeper concern reflected in criticisms of business jargon about the role of business in our society. And there certainly are people who are worried that corporate culture and business generally has
00:07:39 Speaker_01
taken on an outsized role socially and that may again get reflected in complaints about business jargon.
00:07:49 Speaker_03
Anne says some people are concerned that corporate culture has an outsized role in our society. That means that the world of work and business is too big a part of our lives.
00:08:00 Speaker_07
Lots of people criticise jargon, but as Anne Curtin said, gradually we start to use new jargon terms and then eventually we don't even think of them as jargon anymore.
00:08:10 Speaker_03
So yeah, in this series we hope we've helped you understand more strange jargon, what it means and when to use it. Send us any words and phrases you don't understand to learning.english at bbc.co.uk.
00:08:26 Speaker_07
That's it for this episode of Learning English for Work. We're taking a break over Christmas and New Year, but we'll be back with more episodes next year.
00:08:36 Speaker_03
Until then, find loads more resources to help you with your English on our website. Why not follow our podcast Learning English from the News to learn the language to talk about big news stories.
00:08:47 Speaker_03
Search Learning English from the News in your podcast app.
00:08:52 Speaker_07
And if you want to listen to the full programme we made with Business Daily about business jargon, you can find a link in the notes for this episode. Bye for now.
00:09:01 Speaker_03
Bye.
00:09:12 Speaker_05
Learn English from the news with BBC Learning English. One big story every week, three news headlines and all the vocabulary you need to understand the story in English. Plus, you can download a free worksheet on our website for every episode.
00:09:36 Speaker_05
Search Learning English from the News on your podcast app or visit bbclearningenglish.com.
00:09:53 Speaker_04
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00:10:59 Speaker_06
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00:11:48 Speaker_06
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00:11:59 Speaker_04
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