What is "garbage language" and why is it so hard to avoid using?

Lawyers have their legalese. Academics have their own intra-academialogical post-linguistic theories. And it was only before the MBAs joined the fray with their own self-important syntax. If you've ever been in the sleek office setting of a start-up or some tech-savvy corporation, you've heard it. You may have even picked up on its tics to help you sound smarter, too; after all, that's how it works.

Molly Young has a great new piece at Vulture about this phenomenon, which she has coined "Garbage Language." Her article is full of insight not only into the ways that we do and don't communicate, but also how that reflects the other issues inherent in these kinds of office cultures:

[G]arbage languageworks because garbage is what we produce mindlessly in the course of our days and because it smells horrible and looks ugly and we dont think about it except when were saying that its bad, as I am right now.

But unlike garbage, which we contain in wastebaskets and landfills, the hideous nature of these words their facility to warp and impede communication is also their purpose. Garbage language permeates the ways we think of our jobs and shapes our identities as workers. It is obvious that the point is concealment; it is less obvious what so many of us are trying to hide.

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When we adopt words that connect us to a larger project that simultaneously fold us into an institutional organism and insist on that institutions worthiness it is easier to pretend that our jobs are more interesting than they seem.