The weird history of corporate jargon
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Today: Taylor Swift breaks her own record, a jargon decoder, and how to give the best compliments
By Harris Sockel
Every word contains an imprint of its history — even corporate jargon.
Case in point: Chris Anderson, the former editor-in-chief of Wired, has been updating this giant list of words people use to sound smart since 2020. It’s etymology-coded, meaning he’s grouped words by their discipline of origin. Two heavy-hitters in Zoom calls these days, “bandwidth” and “signal to noise,” come from electrical engineering. They were once used by radio operators.
In fact, so many of the words we throw around in meetings were plucked from science, math, and military jargon. A few more examples: “over-index” (instead of bias) comes directly from statistics. “Mission creep” is a military term originally used to describe U.S. involvement in the Somali civil war. “Exponential growth” is obviously from math — though most of the line graphs people casually call “exponential” in meetings are actually polynomial.
Here’s my favorite, by far the weirdest: light cone. It’s a physics term (meaning “all of the light emitted from a point in space”) that smart-seeming people use to mean “full extent.” Sam Altman once dropped “light cone” in a sentence during a TechCrunch interview. I thought it was the most pretentious phrase I’d ever heard. What do you think? “If OpenAI cracks AGI, it could capture the light cone of all future value in the universe.”
May you find all the bandwidth you need to titrate your distractions and seek signal in the noise today 🙏
What else we’re reading
- Within 24 hours after its April 19th drop, Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department had been streamed over 300 million times — breaking a record for the most Spotify streams within a single day. (Midnights broke the same record in 2022.) On Medium, musician and journalist Giovanni Colantonio calls TTPD one of the most hostile albums in history, replete with bangers that criticize Taylor’s fandom and fame itself.
- CEO advisor Roger Martin on why industries shouldn’t just compete against other players in their local market, but against all players, everywhere: “Disruption isn’t random. It strikes industries that don’t attempt to win [in their category], that don’t make the investments necessary to pursue better ways of competing.” TLDR: The market punishes complacency.
Your daily dose of practical wisdom (about giving feedback)
Generic positive feedback (“great job!”) helps no one. If you really want to help someone grow, deliver a specific, meaningful, and timely compliment. For example: “You presented that problem very effectively today. You had the relevant data and showed it in a simple way so everyone could see where we had to change.”
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Edited and produced by Jon Gluck & Carly Rose Gillis
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