Ping it! Kick it! Circle back! Why is office speak like a 90s kids game?
Hari remembers playing Bop-it! as a child and wonders if the modern workplace hasn’t taken the jargon thing a bit too far…
Ping it back! Kick it up! Circle back!
Does anyone else ever feel like they're in a nightmarish version of the 90s electronic game Bop-It?
Did you ever play it? It's a device with handles and buttons, things to grab and squeeze and twist and pull, and you have to obey the tinny instructions and do every weird movement until it's too fast to hear or you do the wrong thing and fail.
I remember being annoyed that the instruction was to “bop it” rather than to “press it” or “hit it.” Bop it - to my mind - didn’t make sense to use when there was already perfectly correct words in existence.
And then once day I found myself saying, in all seriousness and with no irony at all, “let’s circle back after we’ve kicked that up the chain. Ping me the deck and I’ll sort it.”
I mean, wow.
The jargon level there is a solid 8/10. All it needs is an “ideate” or an “actualise” and I’m barely speaking English anymore.
So why do so many of us embrace the office jargon and talk like ninnies so enthusiastically?
I think it’s a lot to do with the social pressure of wanting to fit in.
And I know all about that.
I don’t talk about it much but I am neurodiverse, and have spent plenty of time stuck on the outside of conversations and social groups trying to figure out what to do or so.
I would have killed for some in-group language to latch on to.
And that’s what all this office speak is.
It’s in-group language.
In-groups are people on the inside, accepted, part of the team. In school they might be a cool kids or the sports teams.
But in-groups can form around anything - being popular is not a requirement. If you spend a large amount of time with a set group of people with whom you share common interests that’s an in-group.
Fandom is a type of in-group. Be it Trekkies or Man U fans or Swifties - these are all in-groups.
And any successful in-group will start to form its own language.
Sometimes that language migrates out from the in-groups to the rest of us - we’ve all heard about red shirts (disposable extras who die first) and red pills (extreme men’s rights rhetoric). But most language stays within the group. Knowing how to use it, what the emojis and abbreviations mean, that’s what marks you as part of the in-group.
Outside of that in the out-groups are all the people who are not part of the in-group.
Human beings are social, tribal animals. We are genetically programmed to want to find our tribe. No one likes being on the outside. It’s lonely and cold and it may well mean the in-group tribe won’t let you share the supplies to last through the Winter.
So when we spot a bit of in-group language - calling a Powerpoint a deck for example, or saying “ping me an email” rather than “send me an email,” we grab at it with both hands.
If I say “ping” and “deck” and “circle back”, I think, that will make me part of the in-group. It will show I’m in the know, that I am in the right place, part of the team.
But what it doesn’t do it make you any easier to understand.
I’ve worked with a lot of people who used jargon they didn’t really know the meaning of. I’ve done it myself on occasion.
And it didn’t really make me part of the in-group, it was all a pretence. What it did make me was harder for more people to understand, especially those whose first language wasn’t English.
In our increasingly international world, in-group jargon is a problem. It doesn’t translate well.
And you have to ask yourself, would you rather pretend to be part of the in-group? Or use plain and simple English whenever you can because in the end people understanding what you say is much more important than dropping a few buzz in-group words.
