At the glittering launch of a major bank’s new features a few years ago the CEO asked me excitedly afterwards: “What do you think?”
I really thought about my answer before replying: “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 understood, 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 SA, 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, saying: “I’m afraid I speak English as my first language, as do my readers, 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 “the solution” or “compute” instead of “computing power”.
But turning a phrase into a shorter phrase or three-letter acronym (there’s even 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, for instance.
Own shorthand
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” about a supposedly new AI service that is 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 startlingly true of this week’s latest pointless talkfest, the G20 — and for that matter the B20 and all the other derivatives. I’ve spent the past few months asking people what they know of the G20 and how it might affect their lives. Basically, nothing.
Except that traffic will be disrupted. Also, you might get your potholes fixed if your suburb is on any of the thoroughfares between Sandton, Nasrec, the airport and hotels.
Despite its prominence, the giant pothole on Jan Smuts Avenue seems to have no hope of being repaired, despite straddling two of the three lanes. There’s no way Ramaphosa can drive from his house in Hyde Park to the Joburg CBD offices without seeing that two-lane closure with giant yellow barriers. I know this because I was overtaken by his cavalcade on that very road in April.
The potholes are so rampant trhat 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 last month.
Except, while the politicians are too busy gorging at the trough before the next elections to care about anything else, the citizens haven’t given up. Private initiatives such as Discovery’s have fixed 320,000 potholes since 2021, as have other private sector programmes.
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, SA is a country where potholes make news headlines — including an unexpected way to get them sorted out. Angry residents spray-painted “ANC” near potholes, and they were miraculously fixed within days. Maybe that’s what the Jan Smuts Ave pothole needs.
For the bosses
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.
On Wednesday a lane of the M3 double-decker highway was blocked to traffic as workers hurriedly put up banners bearing the faces of the attending G20 leaders.
Nobody thought to remove Chinese President Xi Jinping given that he’s cancelled, but then the banners will only be seen this weekend. So much for that missed marketing opportunity.
• Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za.
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