CCHU9094-Essay
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TOOL OR WEAPON 1
A Tool or a Weapon? Analysing the Exploitation of Corporate Jargon in Workplace
Communication
Zhan Ho Jacob Shing
CCHU9094: From Grunts to Grammar: The Evolution of Human Communication
The University of Hong Kong
Dr. Manwa Lawrence Ng
13 April 2026
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TOOL OR WEAPON 2
Consider a scenario set in a quarterly business review meeting at a middle-sized corporation
that has recently fallen short of its financial targets substantially. The participants include
a senior executive, a mid-level manager who has been in the firm for several years, a junior
employee who has been with the company for less than a year, and several other staff members.
The situation of the firm is beyond recovery and downsizing is inevitable.
The ultimate goal of the senior executive is not a simple disclosure of the situation
and the decision of layoffs, but rather using a strategic communication approach, or as we
call it, “corporate jargon”, to prevent panic, maintain morale, preserve a facade of control and
competence, and motivate and reassure the remaining workforce. In simpler terms, the goals
are to control and to heal.
This essay argues that corporate jargon is a series of meticulous linguistic choices
(Zamfir, 2024) that function primarily as tools of social control and manipulation through
the mechanisms of euphemism, obfuscation through syntactic manoeuvring, and shibboleth.
The essay further argues that while the use of corporate jargon is intended to be a tool for
constructive communication, it can easily become a weapon that alienates different audiences.
The Linguistic Mechanics of Obfuscation
This section explores the verbal strategies employed in corporate jargon used by the
senior executive, illustrated by examples for the scenario described above.
A Linguistic Choice: Euphemism and the Euphemism Treadmill
Stein (1999) defines euphemism as a substituted fragment of language that conveys
fewer negative connotations than the original term, which is often considered offensive or
harsh. Rittenburg et al. (2016) see euphemism as a way of reducing transparency, thereby
serving the function of obfuscation. In other words, euphemisms are used as a semantic softening
agent. For the scenario of this essay, the senior executive may employ terms such as, as Vickers
(2002) suggested, “right-sizing”, “downsizing”, or “shifted resources” instead of the more
straightforward terms “layoffs”, if not “firings”. As for the substantial shortfall in meeting
targets, rather than a disaster-like “failure”, one may frame it as a “challenge” or a “need for
calibration of expectations”. The use of euphemisms in this context often shifts the focus from
the negative aspects of the situations to a more positive connotation, which can help maintain
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morale while also obscuring responsibility, achieving the purposes of control (managing the
emotions and response of the employees) and healing (preserving the image of the executive
as a competent leader).
However, one may argue that the controlling and healing effects from the perpetual
use of these terms gradually wear off, as the audience starts to map the euphemisms to the
underlying negative realities. Indeed, as Lumen Learning (n.d.) suggested, in the modern
corporate life, the term “downsizing” is generally considered to be delivering a negative connotation.
Nevertheless, this is an expected outcome of the use of euphemisms, as Stein (1999) also
noted that euphemisms draw away attention from the negative ideas on one level, but they,
on a deeper and uncommunicated level, also imply what is being euphemised.
To overcome the weakened euphemisms, new euphemisms need to be invented. This
behaviour is known as the “euphemism treadmill” (Pinker, 1994). On this treadmill, the words
are constantly renewed, powering euphemism to sustain itself over decades of corporate communication.
While more senior or experienced employees may be already familiar with decoding phrases
like “downsizing”, the shift towards “right-sizing” or “workforce optimisation” may buy the
executive some time and further defer the negative connotations for both senior and junior
employees.
In Jakobson’s (1960) terms, euphemisms of corporate jargon are strategic exploitations
of the expressive (to inform) and phatic functions (to keep social bonds) of language, while
also skilfully mutating the referential function (to refer to the underlying ugliness) to achieve
the purposes of control and healing.
Syntactic Manoeuvring: Nominalisation and Passive Voice
While euphemism lives on the lexical level, corporate jargon also exploits the syntactic
or grammatical level to achieve obfuscation. It is not uncommon for corporate jargon to intentionally
use complex syntactic structures to create further obfuscation and blur responsibility. Whereas
Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) view nominalisation as an essential tool for English, Bello
(2016) examines its cognitive implications – turning a dynamic action, often acted by a person,
into a static, reified object. Nominalisation leads humans’ minds into isolating the objects
from the agent and the person being acted upon (Barsalou et al., 2010), and thus creates a
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TOOL OR WEAPON 4
sense of detachment of responsibility and agency.
For example, rather than saying “the company has failed to meet its targets”, the senior
executive could have instead phrased it as “a recent challenge has been noted in the area of
target achievement”, which transforms the verb “to fail” and “to meet” into “challenge” and
“achievement”, respectively. As for the layoffs, instead of saying “we have decided to lay off
20% of the workforce”, it could have been “a decision of workforce simplification has been
made”.
One should immediately notice that in the above examples, nominalisation is often
accompanied by the employment of passive voice. Indeed, the passive construction is a common
verbal strategy for drawing attention towards the action and the result, rather than the agents
(Memmedli, 2025). In such constructions, the agent is introduced by a “by” clause, which can
further be omitted to entirely erase agency, and in turn, responsibility (Bailey, 1997).
Not coincidentally, the use of nominalisation and passive voice serves the same purpose
of obfuscation through detachment of agency and responsibility. This sort of language manipulation
is particularly effective in the setting of corporate communication through delegating the
responsibility to virtually no one, while the senior executives remain in control of the narrative.
The objectification of the actions taken also eliminates the tied sentiments of guilt and blame,
which is crucial for maintaining morale, and hence, the healing function of language.
The Shibboleth Effect: Passwords for Identity Gatekeeping
Having explored the syntactic linguistic strategies, this essay now dives deeper into
the sociolinguistic mechanism of shibboleth. Serving as an insider/outsider test historically
(McNamara, 2005), the shibboleth effect has now been established as a linguistic marker
and tool of social differentiation and bifurcation (Busch & Spitzm¨uller, 2021). Busch and
Spitzm¨uller (2021) further argue that shibboleths are linguistic passwords that create a binary
distinction, shaped by the underlying power dynamics. In modern contexts, shibboleths are
simply defined as words or phrases that are only used and understood by a specific group of
people.
Recall that in the scenario, remaining employees that are not laid off still need to be
motivated and reassured. For those who are already familiar with corporate jargon, hearing
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“this is a pivotal moment” and “we need to reposition ourselves to create synergies” while
decoding them internally to “things are really bad now” and “we need to take up more work to
account for the layoffs”, respectively, may actually be comforting thanks to a sense of identity
and belonging. Through Jakobson’s (1960) theory, the vagueness and abstractness of these
phrases in fact mute the referential function, delivering no information at all. However, this is
a clever exploitation of the phatic function, as the employees that are capable of decoding the
jargon comfortably pass the shibboleth test, and hence feel a stronger sense of belonging to
the in-group. As established by Van De Mieroop (2023), this is a powerful process of “identity
gatekeeping”, which can be a strong tool of social control.
Be that as it may, one intuitive counterargument is that the shibboleth language easily
alienates the junior employees who are not familiar with the jargon (Busch & Spitzm¨uller,
2021; McNamara, 2005). As this essay shall later reveal, the shibboleth effect indeed serves
the controlling function of corporate jargon well, but it also risks alienating the junior employees,
whose motivation is crucial for the healing function of corporate communication.
Outcomes
Intended Outcomes
To briefly summarise the above analysis, corporate jargon is a synthesis of verbal
strategies, from the smallest unit of language (through euphemism) to the syntactic level (by
nominalisation and passive voice), and finally to a grander sociolinguistic layer (through shibboleth),
that achieves the purposes of control and healing in a workplace setting.
Unintended Outcomes
It has been established that the euphemism treadmill is a powerful engine to keep
corporate jargon in fashion, nevertheless, it was more about a generalised audience. That is,
the sense of positivity is refreshed in the general sense. If we examine from the perspective of
one individual employee, it is not difficult to see that the fatigue of decoding accumulates and
does not get refreshed by the treadmill. Take the senior employee for example, the constant
renewal of euphemistic terms may initially buy the executive time, but as the employee becomes
more accustomed to the jargon, the alternative terms may convey just the same level of negative
connotation. This is where the euphemism strategy can fail to achieve its intended purposes of
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control and healing.
As for the shibboleth effect, while it can strengthen the bond of the more experienced,
for the junior employees, it can be doing the exact contrary – creating confusion and alienation.
This is the nature of the shibboleth effect, rather than a flaw of corporate jargon – it amplifies
the existing bonds and puts the barrier higher for the outsiders. In Bourdieu and Thompson’s
(1992) theory of linguistic capital, the outsiders, in this case, the junior employees, often pay a
significant cost to acquire the identity from the linguistic market. When the cost is higher than
the sense of belonging itself, the outsiders may just give up altogether and feel alienated from
the in-group internally, which is the opposite of the intended function of corporate jargon.
Reflections and Conclusion
To conclude, corporate jargon is a powerful linguistic tool that can be used to control
and heal in a workplace setting, but its excessive and non-selective use can lead to the opposite
of its intended outcomes, which is to alienate and to divide. This tool consists of multi-layered
linguistic manipulations, from lexical to sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic levels, that work
together to achieve the major purposes of control and healing.
Inherently, corporate jargon was created for the sake of efficient communication in
corporate life, through features such as brevity and abbreviations (Kapralikova, 2024), nominalisation
(Bailey, 1997), et cetera. These features aim to create a shared language that is efficient, objective,
professional, and agent-neutral. In certain contexts, when applied appropriately, corporate
jargon is indeed a useful tool of verbal communication. However, when the jargon is deployed
solely for obfuscation, it can easily become a weapon that alienates different audiences, either
intentionally or unintentionally.
This essay further reveals that language itself is never neutral, but rather, it is always
with a purpose. The choice of words is not a merely stylistic preference, but an act of ethical
and social responsibility. While clarity is often the idealised standard for communication,
including corporate jargon, ambiguity and abstraction are often strategically weaponised for
power management. The question, then, is not whether language can be exploited – it always
can be – but rather, who is empowered to exploit, and at whose expense.
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References
Bailey, E. P. (1997). The plain English approach to business writing. Oxford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195115659.003.0006
Barsalou, L. W., Wilson, C. D., & Hasenkamp, W. (2010). On the vices of nominalization and
the virtues of contextualizing. In L. F. Barrett, B. Mesquita & E. R. Smith (Eds.), The
mind in context (pp. 334–360). The Guilford Press.
Bello, I. (2016). Cognitive implications of nominalizations in the advancement of scientific
discourse. International Journal of English Studies, 16 (2), 1–23.
Bourdieu, P., & Thompson, J. B. (1992). Language and symbolic power. Polity.
Busch, B., & Spitzm¨uller, J. (2021). Indexical borders: The sociolinguistic scales of the shibboleth.
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 272(1), 127–152. https://doi.org/
10.1515/ijsl-2020-0095
Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar
(3rd ed., rev.). Arnold.
Jakobson, R. (1960). Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics. In T. A. Sebeok (Ed.), Style
in language (pp. 350–377). Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
John Wiley & Sons.
Kapralikova, I. (2024). Abbreviations as a modern phenomenon in business jargon. CASALC
Review, 14(2). https://doi.org/10.5817/CASALC2024-2-6
Lumen Learning. (n.d.). Introduction to downsizing [Human Resources Management (Module
11: Employee Termination)]. Retrieved April 14, 2026, from https://courses.lumenlearning.
com/wm-humanresourcesmgmt/chapter/introduction-to-downsizing/
McNamara, T. (2005). 21st century shibboleth: Language tests, identity and intergroup conflict.
Language Policy, 4, 351–370. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-005-2886-0
Memmedli, A. (2025). Passive voice in English discourse: Significance for academic writing
and communication. Porta Universorum, 1(10), 13–22. https :// doi . org/ 10 . 69760 /
portuni.0110002
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Pinker, S. (1994). The game of the name [Opinion piece]. The New York Times. Retrieved
April 14, 2026, from https : / / stevenpinker . com / files / pinker / files / 1994 04 03
newyorktimes.pdf
Rittenburg, T. L., Gladney, G. A., & Stephenson, T. (2016). The effects of euphemism usage
in business contexts. Journal of Business Ethics, 137(2), 315–320. https://doi.org/10.
1007/s10551-014-2501-4
Stein, H. F. (1999). Euphemism, spin, and the crisis in organizational life. Quorum Books.
Van De Mieroop, D. (2023). Identity gatekeeping in new work order organizations. Pragmatics
and Society, 14(4), 519–545. https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.20039.van
Vickers, M. H. (2002). “people first—always”: Euphemism and rhetoric as troublesome influences
on organizational sense-making—a downsizing case study. Employee Responsibilities
and Rights Journal, 14(2/3), 105–118. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021175721529
Zamfir, C.-M. (2024). Business-speak: Jargon and slang corporate expressions hauling around
the business arena. British and American Studies, 30(30), 195–203. https://doi.org/10.
35923/BAS.30.18
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See also
-
CCCH9044-Individual-Essay
The 3000-word individual essay for the course CCCH9044.
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CCGL9042-Question-Bank
The question bank for CCGL9042 in-class quizzes.
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CCST9064-Video-Essay
The final video essay submitted for CCST9064 group project. Python code for Manim included.
-
COMP1110-Project
The GitHub repository of the group project.
-
COMP1110-Project-IndividualReport_JacobShing
Individual report for COMP1110 (25/26 Spring) by Jacob Shing.
-
COMP1110-Project-Plan
The project plan for COMP1110 (25/26 Spring).