I am currently staring at the bridge of my nose, or at least the blurry space where it meets the air, trying to ignore the pulsing behind my left eye. The Zoom grid has 21 faces on it, but only one is speaking. He is a consultant from a firm whose name sounds like a brand of high-end mineral water, and he has just uttered a sentence that should be illegal in at least 41 states. ‘We need to leverage our core competencies to operationalize a paradigm shift in our go-to-market strategy,’ he says. He pauses, leaning into the camera as if he’s just delivered the Sermon on the Mount. Around the digital room, heads nod. It is a synchronized, rhythmic motion, the kind you see in cults or very high-end synchronized swimming. No one asks what it means. No one asks if ‘operationalizing a paradigm shift’ involves actually doing anything, or if it’s just a way to spend the remaining $171,001 in the quarterly budget.

Pearl P.-A., a financial literacy educator I’ve known for 11 years, is the only other person on the call not nodding. I can see her in the bottom corner of my screen. She’s looking at a physical piece of paper, probably a bank statement or a grocery receipt, because Pearl deals in things that actually exist. Later, when the call ends without a single concrete action item being decided upon, she calls me. Pearl doesn’t use the word ‘touchbase.’ She just rings the phone. ‘Did you hear that?’ she asks. ‘That man spent 61 minutes telling us that he doesn’t have a plan. He’s charging that client $501 an hour to hide the fact that he hasn’t done the research.’

The Inflation of the Abstract

Pearl has a theory about this. She calls it the ‘Inflation of the Abstract.’ In her world of financial literacy, she sees it every day. Banks don’t tell you that they’re going to take your money if you don’t pay; they talk about ‘collateral liquidation protocols.’ It sounds clean. It sounds like something a computer decided, not a person in a suit.

Pearl once spent 31 days reading through the entire terms and conditions of a major credit card agreement just to prove a point. She found that the word ‘transparency’ appeared 21 times, while the actual fees were hidden in a paragraph that was 101 lines long and written in a font size that required a microscope. I did the same thing last week-I read a full 51-page software agreement from start to finish. It’s a form of self-torture, I admit, but it reveals the architecture of the lie. The more jargon a document contains, the more likely it is that someone is trying to take something from you without you noticing.

The Vacuum of Clear Thought

When a culture’s language becomes detached from reality, the actions of that culture follow suit. We see this in big tech especially. I’ve spent the last 11 months observing how companies describe their ‘innovations.’ They never just build a better tool; they ‘disrupt the vertical.’ They don’t make things easier to use; they ‘frictionlessly integrate the user journey.’ It’s exhausting. And it’s dangerous because it creates a vacuum where clear thought should be. If you can’t describe what you do to a 61-year-old grandmother or an 11-year-old kid without using words that end in ‘-ize’ or ‘-ality,’ do you actually know what you’re doing? Probably not. You’re likely just riding the wave of Jargon as a Service, hoping that the buzzwords will carry you to the next funding round before anyone realizes the emperor is not only naked but doesn’t even know how to sew.

This is why I find myself gravitating toward brands that treat language like a utility rather than a performance. There’s a certain honesty in a company that says, ‘Here is a phone. It has a good camera. It will not break if you drop it in the sink.’ It sounds almost radical, doesn’t it? In an era where every product is ‘revolutionary,’ simple clarity is the true rebellion. Tech retail is a minefield of this stuff, which is why when you find a place like Bomba.md, it feels like finding an oxygen mask in a smoke-filled room. They aren’t trying to ‘curate a digital lifestyle’ for you. They’re just selling you the tech you need without the linguistic fluff. They understand that a customer isn’t looking for a ‘paradigm-shifting mobile solution’; they’re looking for a phone that stays charged during a 41-minute commute. The irony is that the more ‘sophisticated’ we try to sound, the less we actually communicate.

The Gatekeeping Mechanism

Pearl P.-A. told me about a student of hers who was terrified of investing because he thought he needed to understand ‘quantitative easing’ and ‘beta coefficients.’ He thought finance was a secret language. Pearl sat him down and used 11 oranges to explain market volatility. By the end of the hour, he wasn’t just less afraid; he was angry. He realized that the jargon wasn’t there to help him learn; it was there to keep him out. It’s a gatekeeping mechanism. If you don’t speak the jargon, you don’t belong in the room. And if you’re not in the room, you don’t get to ask where the money went.

I’ve been guilty of this too. I remember a project 21 months ago where I wrote a report so dense with industry terms that I actually forgot what the original problem was. I was trying to impress a board of directors that I felt intimidated by. I used words like ‘interoperability’ and ‘scalability’ as shields. I thought that if I sounded like a textbook, they wouldn’t notice that I was guessing. It worked, which is the scariest part. They loved the report. They printed 51 copies of it. And 1 year later, the project failed because we hadn’t addressed the one concrete problem that actually mattered: the software was too slow. We had scaled the ‘interoperability’ right off a cliff.

The Act of Resistance

If we want to fix this, we have to start by being uncomfortable. We have to be the person on the Zoom call who says, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean by “socializing the initiative.” Do you mean you want to send an email?’ It sounds small, but it’s an act of massive resistance. It forces the speaker to come back to earth. It forces the consultant to admit that the $501 an hour they’re charging is for something that could be explained in 11 seconds. We need more people like Pearl, who look at a 101-page document and start highlighting the parts that don’t make sense until the whole thing is neon yellow.

There is a peculiar kind of beauty in a well-placed, simple word. When you strip away the ‘optimized’ and the ‘leveraged,’ you’re left with the truth. Sometimes the truth is that we don’t have a plan. Sometimes the truth is that the product isn’t ready. And that’s okay. At least you can build something on the truth. You can’t build anything on a ‘paradigm shift’ except more jargon. I’m looking at my notes from the meeting now. There are 21 bullet points. Not one of them contains a verb that involves a physical action. It’s all ‘monitoring,’ ‘assessing,’ and ‘aligning.’ I think I’ll delete them all and just write one sentence: ‘Call the client and ask what they actually need.’ It’s only 11 words long. It’s simple. It’s clear. And in today’s corporate world, it’s probably the most ‘disruptive’ thing I could possibly do.