The squeak of the blue marker is the only sound of actual effort in the room. It’s a dry, complaining noise against the whiteboard’s glossy surface. David, the VP with a watch worth more than my first car, is connecting circles with arrows. Inside the circles are the words: Ecosystem. Synergy. Value-Add. Disrupt. Scalable Paradigms. He steps back, admiring his work like an artist who has just revealed the soul of the universe. Everyone nods. It’s that slow, thoughtful nod that says, ‘I am a serious person engaging with serious ideas,’ but whose eyes betray the truth: ‘I have no idea what this means for Monday morning.’

We’ve all been in that room. The air is thick with the fog of abstraction, a linguistic haze so dense you could lose a whole department in it for a fiscal quarter. For years, I told myself this was just the cost of doing business at a certain level. You trade simple language for complex concepts. I even got good at it. I could ‘circle back’ and ‘piggyback’ and ‘leverage core competencies’ with the best of them. I criticized it in private, over cheap beer with trusted colleagues, and then walked into a meeting the next day and did it anyway. It felt like a uniform you had to wear to be taken seriously.

The Cost of Ambiguity

It’s a carefully constructed system for avoiding accountability. When you say, ‘We need to synergize our cross-functional teams to ideate a new value-add proposition,’ and the project fails, who is to blame? The language itself provides the excuse. The synergy was off. The ideation wasn’t disruptive enough. The value-add was misaligned with the paradigm. It’s a linguistic shell game where the pea is never under any of the shells because there was never a pea to begin with.

I have a friend, Nina N.S., who inspects bridges. Her world has no room for this fog. When she files a report, she doesn’t say a girder exhibits ‘sub-optimal structural integrity.’ She says, ‘There is a 35-millimeter fracture in the lower flange of girder C-5, compromising its tensile strength by 25 percent. Load capacity is reduced to 45 tonnes until remediation is complete.’ The consequences of her language are real and immediate. People live or die based on her clarity.

We, in our climate-controlled offices, have forgotten the feeling of words being connected to things. Our words are connected only to other words, a self-referential loop of jargon that generates heat but no light. This linguistic drift erodes our most important tool: critical thought. It creates a culture where sounding smart is valued more than being clear, and where asking ‘Wait, what does that actually mean?’ is seen as a sign of ignorance rather than intelligence. It’s a collective delusion that keeps us from confronting hard truths, like ‘This product isn’t selling because it’s not very good’ or ‘No one in this room has a clear plan.’ We would rather spend 235 thousand dollars on consultants to help us ‘re-contextualize our market-facing narrative’ than admit the story we’re telling is boring.

I once sat in a project post-mortem where the failure was blamed on a ‘disconnect in strategic alignment.’ It took 45 minutes of this verbal dance before a junior engineer, who was probably on his way out anyway, finally spoke up. He said, ‘No, the project failed because the specs were sent to the wrong team, and nobody checked for 25 days.’

The Antidote: Visceral Reconnection

There is an antidote to this. It’s the visceral reconnection of action and outcome. It’s about finding spaces where the goal is unambiguous and the language is, by necessity, simple. For Nina, it’s the cold steel of a bridge. For others, it might be baking bread, coding a functional app, or fixing an engine. It’s the world of things, not the world of words about things. The objective isn’t to ‘leverage our bipedal momentum’ but to ‘walk to the store.’ It turns out that escaping the conference room is the best way to remember how to think clearly. My version of this escape, the thing that recalibrates my tolerance for nonsense, is putting myself in a situation where the objective is massive, physical, and requires no explanation.

A week of this kind of clarity can undo a year of corporate fog, which is why expeditions like Morocco cycling tours are less a vacation and more a necessary cognitive reset.

This isn’t an argument to ban complex language. Specialized fields require specialized terms. Nina uses them. A doctor uses them. But their language is a tool for greater precision, not a shield for ambiguity. It’s designed to eliminate misunderstanding, not create it. The difference is intent.

We use big words to hide the terrifying possibility that we are small people in jobs that are too big for us, facing problems we don’t know how to solve. It’s a symptom of institutional fear. Fear of failure, fear of looking stupid, fear of being the one person in the room who doesn’t nod along. But the clarity we are so afraid of is the only thing that allows for real progress. The junior engineer who spoke up wasn’t being difficult; he was offering the only path forward. The path that begins with a clear, honest, and sometimes embarrassing assessment of reality. It’s a much harder path than the one paved with buzzwords, but it’s the only one that actually leads somewhere worth going.