Office Speak: Word Salad

You have walked into a restaurant and order a superfood salad; whatever that really means. I few minutes later the waiter arrives with a plate containing a wonderful selection of grains and fruit, leaves and tomato, nuts and goats cheese. All of the ingredients are placed randomly on the plate yet somehow it doesn’t look like a mess, it looks tasty and delicious.

This is a salad.

You are listening to a corporate communication which is filled with a wonderful array of business speak – synergies, win-win, low-hanging fruit, culture, silos, competencies, wheelhouse, strategic, transformational, world-beating, and actions.

You know what each of these terms means. You think you know the context in which the words are being used and yet, you think to yourself “I have no idea what this person is saying, these words don’t make any sense.” It doesn’t taste delicious, it tastes unpalatable.

This is word salad.

Or perhaps you are in a question and answer session and a tricky question comes up. The person providing the answers starts talking, and talking, and even talking a bit more. They use lots of words, impressive sounding words, technical sounding terms, and yet they don’t make any sense.

This is word salad.

A current colleague has used the term for a long time, but I’ve heard it more broadly in recent weeks and months so decided it was time to promote it to Office Speak.

According to Google Trends there has, since the spring of 2024, been a significant increase in people searching for it.

Some of the increase is related to the release of a word game with the same name that the Sunday Times, no less, described as “the game of the moment.” I’ve never played it so I’m in no position to comment on how good it is, but I do find it fascinating that this semi-obscure term has, in quite a short time, become mainstream.

The increase is likely, also, attributable to the growing group of politicians trying to avoid giving an unpalatable answer. In recent months I’ve noticed the same tactic being deployed by business people to similar ends.

There’s plenty of Office Speak that could be termed word salad.

While salad is, dependent upon your preferences, tasty and healthy, word salad is unpalatable and decidedly unhealthy.

While I am pointing fingers at several groups, the real challenge is that there are still several fingers pointing back at the author. Keeping things simple and understandable is something to which I, for one, need to be vigilant. On a recent project I worked with a person who would edit what I’d written for certain communications. They were brilliant at asking a simple question “Graham, what does that mean?” What I thought obvious was frequently incomprehensible for them, and their English was far better than mine.

Header Image: This is Tewet tarn which sits in the hills near to Threlkeld and not too far from the Castlerigg Stone Circle.