Note the difference between “what is the ask?” and “what do you ask of me?” Questions don’t merely manifest from the ether. Someone has to ask something. The project of most corporate speak is to use obfuscation to remove that person entirely in order to make the social relations necessary for office work seem less degrading.
To see this for yourself, try replacing “what is the ask” with “what do you ask of me” for a day and see how people respond. They probably think it’s blunt or aggressive. Office speak aims to depersonalize.
Next time, try “let me see if I have time to see you” or anything else that restores a little bit of agency back into speech. How do you think people would respond?
Well, the world changes. Like language. And the British Upper Class who has entered business can - in my experience (which actually involves a few guys - but this one was recent - the others were twenty five years ago) business speak with the best of them.
(And some of them might have been mere Sirs and not Lords - none of them used titles at work).
I think the idea here is “code switching”. It’s a term that means using different types of language in different environments. I’ll switch to tossing in Yiddish terms at home, use the language of higher Ed at work and corporate speak when talking to industry colleagues.
Maeglin is a recovering Anglophile. He understands.
Though, to be honest, nobody does corporate speak like the English. My counterparts in London could out-weasel anyone. It was sad to see charming English diffidence shackled to such linguistic mediocrity. In some ways my native American coarseness has slowed the corrosion of our thought and speech. We didn’t have so far to fall.
There is something about British diffidence combined with the depersonalized nature of business speak that will drive someone used to plain spoken English crazy.
The people that keep saying that language is fluid bring up a good point, which is why I’ve decided to embrace slang in an effort to communicate more effectively. From this point forward, I will walk around saying stuff like “empower n00bs to incentivize swag for maximum lulz”, and “Yo shorty, let’s have a hard stop on the Jenkins account workflow. YOLO”
If you say it in the office, don’t be surprised when the sociolinguistic group behavior causes the apes to turn on you.
You don’t chat on WoW channels in business speak, or use MMO chat language in many business meetings. You don’t talk legalese at a wedding reception - but you also don’t write contracts in a conversational style (although legal decisions written by judges with a sense of humor can be really funny), my fifteen year old doesn’t swear around his grandmother and usually remembers to use words like please and thank you, but his language around his friends is far more casual and polite.
I once worked at a place where a bit of poor judgment by an employee elicited a handwritten sign on the bulletin board ending with “Don’t every every every do this again!”