We’re all still at it. The lasting grip of weird business language

We’re all at it. Every day, millions of us walk into our offices, open LinkedIn or join a Teams call and start speaking a language we’d never use anywhere else.

Nobody tells their partner they need to “circle back” on whether there’s milk in the fridge. You don’t ask your friend to “optimise the logistics” of giving you a lift home. You don’t “leverage synergies” with your neighbours to get the bins out. 

Work does something to us, then LinkedIn takes it further.

I’m delighted to announce.

That after an incredible journey 🚀

Filled with learnings.

Growth 🌿

Challenges.

And unforgettable people.

I have finally changed jobs.

LinkedIn has turned the line break into a dramatic biz-speak literary device, where one ordinary sentence turns into seven micro-paragraphs, each needing its own applause break.

I’m at this carry-on too of course. I post on LinkedIn. I write business and tech content for a living. I just searched in my Google Drive docs and found multiple references to “stakeholder engagement”, “thought leadership” and “driving impact”. I’ll be back in five minutes after slamming the laptop shut and going out for some fresh air. 

So this isn’t an intervention for everybody else while I point the finger. The main goal here is that none of us get screenshotted for eternal mortification on the State of LinkedIn Facebook group.

Maybe the bigger problem isn’t really jargon anyway. We’ve all just evolved to think complex words mean impressive communication.

You passed your spelling test. What about reading comprehension?

At school, spellings and reading comprehension were different. You could spell every word in a paragraph perfectly and still have no idea what it meant. The teacher didn’t just ask you to spell “photosynthesis”. They asked you to explain how it happens (in your own words), and maybe draw a crude diagram, making sure the H₂O and CO₂ arrows went the right way. 

The 2002 documentary Spellbound follows kids competing at a superhuman level in the US National Spelling Bee. But nobody watching Spellbound thought of following up years later to see if the winner had written the next iconic postmodern American novel.  

Business writing has its own spelling bee: Leverage. Ecosystem. Transformative. Scalable. Stakeholder. Innovative. Agile. Strategic. Thought leadership. These aren’t bad words, and sometimes they’re exactly the right words. But put enough of them together and you get: “Our integrated strategic framework leverages cross-functional capabilities to drive transformative stakeholder outcomes.”

They’re all words that seem to mean something, but wtf just happened?

Sometimes the guitar solo is longer than the song

There’s a musical version of this too. I’m showing my age here, but I spent the guts of my teenage years in the early 90s reading the metal magazine Kerrang!, where virtuosity was treated with scorn and gleeful contempt (grunge, hardcore and industrial were ‘in’). Steve Vai. Yngwie Malmsteen. Joe Satriani. Guitarists who’d fit more notes in a solo than the whole of Nirvana’s Bleach. All certified geniuses for sure, but I just wanted visceral headbutt riffs and feedback from Helmet or Jesus Lizard.  

Business has the musical equivalent of the 14-minute guitar solo. The writer knows things and wants you to know they know them. A simple sentence starts to feel suspiciously unsophisticated, so “use” becomes “utilise”, a plan becomes a “strategic roadmap” and a meeting turns into a “collaborative stakeholder engagement session”.

The extra notes are there, but is the song any better? 

Sometimes Brian Eno barely needs the notes

Brian Eno took a quietly radical route. His 1978 masterpiece Ambient 1: Music for Airports drifts and wafts for 15-minute stretches on a few distant piano notes, processed voices and synth tones separated by cavernous amounts of space. There isn’t much happening, technically speaking, but something is happening. The next 50 years of a new “ambient music” is happening. 

A few simple notes can communicate more than a song full of finger-cramping chord changes. One clear sentence can sometimes do more work than a paragraph that’s been passed through six stakeholders in a 50-email thread. Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider were classically trained musicians who embraced synthesisers and minimalism while plenty of critics still treated electronics as a shortcut. They had the technique. They just didn’t need to keep proving it.

This isn’t an argument that simple is “better”. Nobody goes to a Beyonce gig for mood lighting and solo piano. If Lady Gaga came out with an acoustic guitar wearing jeans she’d be bottled off the stage. Charlie xcx’s brat album was the all-consuming defining pop culture moment of 2024 and 2025, fuelled in part by its artwork, a fuzzy, crap lowercase font on a slime green background that became one of the most recognisable visual identities of the decade. 

Some language is technical because the subject is technical

Complexity can actually be the point, so we need a big caveat for this anti-jargon rant. At Matrix, we work on loads of technical proposals for domestic and international projects. The expertise of colleagues and international partners involved is genuinely off the scale. Cybersecurity specialists, AI researchers, digital marketers, developers, UX designers, engineers. People immersed in technologies and concepts I can’t start “simplifying” because I think their terminology is too complicated.

There’s a line, and we need technical language because sometimes a precise technical idea needs a precise technical term. As a content writer and former tabloid journalist, my job is knowing that I’m spectacularly underqualified to start rewriting the science.

I leave the technical shots to the experts. A copywriter, content designer or editor does the layup shot for them. Structure it properly, make the argument easier to follow. Make sure somebody without that specialist knowledge at least has a way into a dense passage in a proposal, case study or landing page. 

Sometimes expertise is knowing what can disappear

Iconic music producer Rick Rubin went viral a few years ago when CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked him in an interview what he actually does. He didn’t get defensive, and like a mystic bearded hip-hop and metal sage he proudly declared that he has no real technical musical ability. You’ll find him lying on the couch in his bare feet, vibing and giving feedback, not behind the mixing desk.

He strips down what gets in the way, finds the core idea and helps the artist get their ideas across clearly. An editor doesn’t just bump up the word count and make it sound ‘professional’. Sometimes it’s just knowing what can safely disappear.

Yes, I know what I’ve just done

At this point I’ve dragged a spelling-bee documentary, 90s metal magazines, Brian Eno, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Brat and Rick Rubin into an article about business communication. I’m perilously close to posting “What Brian Eno, Charli xcx and early 90s noise-rock can teach us about B2B communication” on LinkedIn. 

Seven lessons. Rocket emoji. “Agree?” If somebody screenshots this for The State of LinkedIn, I’ve no comeback.

But there’s a distinction. A cultural reference can make an idea easier to understand, or give you a different way into it. That’s really different from desperately reverse-engineering five leadership lessons from whatever film you watched on Sunday night. The reference is a way in, but shouldn’t be the point itself.

Before you hit send

Here’s the tldr version: Good communication doesn’t mean using only small words. It doesn’t mean stripping vital technical language from specialist work or pretending complicated things are simple. It means asking whether the person who needs the information can understand it.

This is why organisations like the HSE and GOV.UK are on a plain language mission. If you’re ever feeling suffocated by biz-speak, read their style guides, and it’ll feel like a righteous manifesto. Their information is advice on basically every complicated situation a person might face throughout their life, explaining law, taxation, pensions, healthcare, illness, public services and other complex processes. Simplifying the writing doesn’t mean simplifying the subject.

So before you hit publish, send or submit, strip the thing back mentally. Read it out loud to yourself. Do you even know what you’re on about? What does the reader actually need to understand? Which technical terms are doing the real work? What can you dump without losing any meaning? 

And if your “transformative, stakeholder-led, cross-functional ecosystem” turns out to mean “we made the website easier to use”, maybe just say that.

Featured hero image: AI-generated illustration created with OpenAI.