Walking the Talk
LOVE KNOWS no barriers. Language, however, does. Walk into any corporate office and you will find yourself assaulted with jargon. The experience is both delightful and disconcerting. Delightful because the rush of verbiage speeding past your head has the attraction of novelty, and disconcerting because you don't have the slightest idea what they are talking about. And therein lies its true beauty.
Jargon is here for a reason. A very good reason. Firstly, it builds a bridge that only professionals swearing allegiance to the same occupation can cross. It creates a sense of community and commonality that binds people from a cross-section of society. Secondly, it keeps strangers away. At any large social gathering, the floor contains two distinctive features - spilled drinks and spilled guests. People tend to congregate in little groups that scatter all over the place like confetti. The idea is simple. Birds of a feather flock together. Fish stay away. For instance, if you were to inadvertently position yourself in a thicket of techies, you'd better know that an application is not something you fill in to get a phone connection, and a floppy disk is nothing to be ashamed of. Similarly, if you entrench yourself in the midst of a group of journalists, you'd best believe that a scoop has very little reference to ice cream, and an open flyer is no cause for embarrassment.
In fact, there already exists a list of corporate vernacular that is at times incredibly funny, or at any rate, as funny as corporate vernacular can be. In the interests of edifying an interested public, here are a few samples:
a. Alphageek: the most skilful employee in the building
b. Career ctrl-alt-del: Starting afresh in a new industry
c. Shoot-the-bull: exaggerate
d. SLIRK: Smart Little Rich Kid, usually used to denote a person who has ascended to the top of the ladder because his daddy owns the company
e. CLM: Career Limiting Move
So, is that all there is to jargon? Is its value relegated to being encoded messages that only people from the same occupation can understand? Yes and no. Professional slang is a set of encoded messages all right, but it can be manipulated further to profit organisations that thrive on secrecy. The value of corporate lingo is incalculable in today's cutthroat world. Not only can jargon create a verbal barrier between people boating through different streams of livelihood, it can construct a coded fence between people from the same profession as well. How? By having jargon that only people working in the same organisation can comprehend. There are many companies that have woken up to the fact that the tongue can be a powerful weapon. If unschooled, it can wreak havoc and when it does that (and it does that often), the consequences are never pretty. So, you have corporate houses where workers speak a different language altogether. The lingo is so indigenously crafted, only employees who belong to the core teams can grasp what is being said.
While jargon is usually a result of accident rather than design, you could develop your own codes and disseminate them through the organisational structure. All it requires is some amount of diligence and innovation. And of course, a sense of cool, or as some might say, `coolth'. The great thing about jargon is it does not have to adhere to grammatical constraints, nor does it have to conform to proper literary standards. So, with some experimentation and luck, you could have a complete range of phrases and words that have an entirely new meaning.
Ultimately, what counts is not how you walk the talk but how you take the talk. When it comes to jargon, the receiver of the message is more important than the sender. He must be able to follow the communiqué. Barriers are after all meant to enclose people within the boundaries of a common ground. Exclusion is sometimes only a matter of choice; a choice that jargon gives you on a silver plate. And we are not just shooting-the-bull about its benefits. It's true.
ARJUN SENGUPTA
arjuns.hyd@cnkonline.com
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