At the glittering launch of a major bank’s new features a couple of years back, the CEO asked me excitedly afterwards: What do you think? I really thought about my answer and replied: “I don’t know who you thought you were talking to, but it wasn’t me (the customer). You were talking to yourself.”
I realised he was talking to his own staff in the language they understand, using the catch phrases the bank had recently adopted. I understood what all the big words meant, and the presentation was great, but none of the things being so excitedly talked about had any bearing on my life as a customer. If there isn’t a phrase for “never a truer word said off-the-top-of-your-head, in-the-moment,” there should be.
It happens a lot in the tech industry, but now it’s happening all over society. Jargon is a useful shorthand in context, but it isn’t how anyone actually talks. When it is overused, it just becomes meaningless.
Press releases promoting a “world-class, best-of-breed, award-winning, world-first, industry-first, first for South Africa, multi-award-winning, random design competition winner” are the bane of the technology journalist.
I used to reply to PR firms, as politely as I could, to say: “I’m afraid I speak English first language, as do my readers, and not jargon. If I have to translate your release into English before I can work out what you are saying, you’ve already lost me.” Now, they are automatically deleted when they arrive in my inbox, and repeat offenders are blocked.
I worked briefly in the PR industry for four days before I resigned. I now know that the intended audience of a press release is not the journalist it is supposedly written for, but (usually) the person quoted in it. Or, mostly, the communications department.
The problem is when people start to think jargon actually has meaning. They use it over and over until they think everyone else uses it or understands it. They hear people say, “the solve” instead of “the solution” or “compute” instead of “computing power”.
But turning a phrase into a shorter phrase or a three-letter acronym (there’s an acronym for that, TLA) doesn’t imbue it with any realistic meaning when the rest of us speak English as our first language.
It’s such a common malaise. People use phrases they’ve heard all the time, often without understanding what they mean or where they came from. I was amazed at how many people didn’t know the origin story of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s “cupcake” nickname until an adorably precocious grade 7 learner said hello to him. We also thank Professor Thuli Madonsela for giving her the opportunity to “shine”.
Like the government, big businesses are increasingly talking to themselves in their own shorthand. Most people don’t know what ESG stands for, let alone ROI or TCO. The latest buzzwords are “digital twin” and, obviously, “AI”. I get so many press releases about the latest “world-first blah blah” featuring supposedly new AI services, which are really mostly the previous iteration with “AI” in the name.
I often think of that disconnect and the many missed opportunities because most people just don’t understand the kind of language being used. This is most startingly true of last week’s pointless talkfest, the G20 Summit. I’ve spent the last few months asking people what they know of the G20 and how it might impact their lives. Basically, nothing.
Except that traffic was disrupted. Also, certain potholes might’ve been fixed if your suburb is on any of the thoroughfares between Sandton, Nasrec, the airport, and the hotels.
Despite its prominence, the giant pothole lurking on Jan Smuts Avenue seems to have no hope of being repaired, despite straddling two of the three lanes. There’s no way President Cyril Ramaphosa can drive from his house in Hyde Park to the City of Joburg offices without seeing the two-lane closure. I know this because I was overtaken by his cavalcade on that very road in April.
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The potholes are so rampant, they’ve become internationally famous. Carte Blanche’s prank to get presenter Macfarlane Moleli to swim in Randburg’s infamous “Jozi jacuzzi” pothole in a wetsuit was reported in the Wall Street Journal’s G20 preview last month.
It was one of the many embarrassments that made the newspaper’s painfully apt headline so distressing: “Welcome to Johannesburg. This is what it looks like when a city gives up.” This is “where instead of providing basic public services, the government just warns residents not to expect them,” it wrote.
Except, while the politicians are too buying looting at the trough before the next elections to care about anything else, the citizens haven’t given up. Private initiatives like Discovery’s have fixed 320,000 potholes since 2021, as have other private sector programs.
An academic even wrote an essay last year about “Johannesburg’s most famous pothole” (this time in Parkhurst) as “the symbol of a broken city” after its weeds reached “the height of an average NBA basketball player.”
Yes, South Africa is a country where potholes make news headlines, including unexpected solutions to get them fixed, such as when angry residents spray-painted “ANC” near such potholes before they were magically fixed. Maybe that’s what the Jan Smuts Ave pothole needs before it can be patched.
Big business and government are renowned for sucking up to their bosses and talking to themselves. If you think I’m making this up, look where all the major international tech firms’ head offices are and where their expat CEOs live (usually Dainfern) and count the company-specific billboards on that route. Same with the airport routes.
Last Wednesday, a lane of the M3 double-decker highway was blocked to traffic as workers hurriedly put up a banner with the faces of the attending leaders. Nobody thought to remove Chinese President Xi Jinping, given that he’s cancelled, but then again, the banners were only seen this past weekend. So much for that missed marketing opportunity.
- This column first appeared on Business Live
