Cursed words

Language is sometimes bad because it is unclear. But language can also be bad in another way. Language can be evil. George Orwell’s famous essay, in which he offers the memorable dictum “Never use a long word where a short one will do,” even suggests that lack of clarity and lack moral fiber are fundamentally related.

I say collaborate, but what I mean is I would like you to do this work for me.

I say that we need to partner with our customer, but what I mean is we need to sell them something.

I say that we met some challenges, but what I mean is that we made some mistakes.

This is not just an issue of communication, it’s an issue of integrity and respect. If you’re using euphemisms that intentionally obfuscate meaning, ask yourself: Am I doing or saying something that I’m ashamed of?

Am I trying to take credit for someone else’s work? Do I believe that my product has no value? Do I think we make stupid mistakes because we’re bad at our jobs?

In most cases, the answers to these questions are no, no, and no. We use these euphemisms not because we’re trying to hide that we’re doing something wrong, but because we’re trying to be nice. We have somehow convinced ourselves that other people can’t handle the reality of our message.

Being nice and being respectful are often in direct opposition to each other—more often than we’d like to admit. Being nice doesn’t really have anything to do with how we treat other people. Being nice is about is how we would like to be seen.

Consider that it might be more respectful to speak to someone in clear language that describes what’s really going on. They might not like what we have to say, and they might even have an emotional reaction to it. They could tell us that they’re unhappy about this in a variety of ways that might be hard to take in the moment.

But it’s better to face up to a difficult conversation than avoid it with unclear communication. At some point, we will have to deal with the real situation anyway.

In the worst examples of this, language becomes dehumanizing. Stop using the word “resources” to refer to people. The same goes for “hires,” which should stay a verb and not a noun. Also, “diverse” is not an adjective to describe a person. Groups can be diverse, but people are Vietnamese, African-American, blind, deaf, and transgender. 

Talking about “diverse hires” or “managing resources” is a way to distance ourselves from the difficult job of dealing with real people who have complex lives and histories.

Compare these two descriptions: 

We don’t have budget to add a new hire. In fact, if we miss our targets again next quarter, we will need to reduce our team size. We need to find innovative solutions to deliver against our goals within the current resource constraints.

We don’t have budget to hire someone new. In fact, if the company doesn’t make enough money next quarter, we might have to let go of some of the people who already work here. We need to find ways to reach the goals we set with the people we have now.

These descriptions are very similar. Both use professional language, and both describe the same painful situation. But by trying to talk around the painful situation, the first description actually makes it sound worse—while simultaneously being less clear. The second description could be even more clear by saying “someone will get fired” or “people have to do better at their jobs” but we can use humanizing language without being confrontational.

But if you don’t want to say “someone will get fired,” you probably also shouldn’t say “reduce our team size.” Maybe this isn’t information you want to share with the team! But we trick ourselves into saying things we shouldn’t by disguising the meaning of what we say.

When we use language that dehumanizes other people, it often has the added problem of removing our humanity from the situation as well. People use dehumanizing language when they want to avoid taking responsibility for their own participation.

This gets even more important when we start talking about our customers—even in our internal discussions, the conversations our customers never hear. When we talk about our customers as people, it changes the way we think about them. We are more likely to identify with them and see things from their perspective. As Orwell puts it, “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”