In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on October 23, 2009

I just stumbled across a wonderful blog called Work Matters run by Bob Sutton (hat tip to Mark Huselid and the HRDivNet mailing list).  One of the terms Bob uses is “Jargon Monoxide” (originally created by Polly LaBarre).  What a wonderful term, and one that I believe should enter the lexicon of those of us who are reading military doctrine and field manuals.

The find was serendipitous.  I just returned from giving a talk at Oklahoma University where, amongst other things, I was talking about how language skews our perceptions of “Truth”.  I wish I had come across the term before, since much of what I was talking about would have benefitted by such a wonderful descriptor.

In Bob’s telling of the story behind the term, he talks about Polly giving a guest lecture in his class on organizational behaviour:

One of the points that she made especially well was that mavericks are so effective at inspiring innovation partly because they use authentic and compelling language, not hollow business language.  She pointed out that, in too many cases, the language used by executives in one company is completely interchangeable with the language used by another; and hollow and meaningless in every place it used. The class just cracked-up when she called this “Jargon monoxide.” Now that is great language!

I agree, it is great language and part of the reason why I think it is is that the analogy to carbon monoxide is particularly compelling – “hollow” and “meaningless” jargon has the same effect: you are lulled to sleep and quietly killed by it.

There is a curious phenomenon that I warn my students about – when you read something, if you don’t really understand it, your brain sort of “fuzzes out” and you get confused.  It is as if a small part of your mind is saying “wait a minute, this just doesn’t make sense!”.  This doesn’t really have much effect if we are reading, say, a magazine article or a work of fiction; we can just toss it down and say it is fertilizer.

But what about when we are reading something that is required by the organization we work for?  How do we get deal with the (potential) lethal effects of jargon monoxide?  Do we just “drink the kool aid” and succumb to the inanity?  Well, we could do that in organizations where we aren’t likely to have much of a deleterious effect on the rest of society.  But what if the jargon monoxide sits in still and barely detectable pools in military doctrine and field manuals?  What if it infused the atmosphere of intelligence organizations?  What if it reaches detectable levels inside religious groups or academic disciplines?  In these institutions, the social effect of jargon monoxide is much more profound and toxic.

Category: Anthropology, Communications Theory, Epistemology
Tags: jargon monoxide