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When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can makewords mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.” (Alice in Wonderland) Some years ago, a new game called ‘Buzzword Bingo’ took the corporate world by storm.

The concept was diabolically simple: cards with management jargon would be distributed to participants in a meeting or seminar. Each card would have different words, a bit like Housie.

Every time the speaker uttered a word and the cardholder had it, he would strike it out. On completion of one line across or down the cardholder would jump up and shout “bullshit.”

The game enjoyed a bit of popularity but quickly died down — corporate types are not one to be seen making fun of their own practices and no one wants to annoy the big honcho, but it was an interesting idea. Besides, it would be a great way to stay awake in meetings.

Think about it. How many times, when you have heard words like stakeholders, or mindset or (horrors) paradigm have you wanted to throw up your hands and scream?

Or, when you read an interview of a tycoon and he says “We are exploring this space” you have wondered if they are planning an expedition to the moon?

The corporate sector is just one of the many places where one encounters cringe-inducing jargon which obfuscates rather than clarifies. Every business and profession has its own jargon, but some overdo it.

Ad types will make heavy weather of simple concepts, no doubt wanting to add that extra touch of mystique to their profession. This not only serves to impress the client but also has turned copy writers into the icons for our times.

So an ad shot at great expense (the client’s, naturally) in some foreign locale, which could be generically used for everything from tyres to shirts to mobile phones is described in self-reverential and glowing tones, all dressed up in jargon.

The same goes for marketing mavens, who will pepper their conversation with words such as aggregate, benchmark, disintermediate, drive, action-items, channels communities, convergence and deliverables. Phew.

Non-Governmental Organisations, which rail against the corporate world, are no better. One award winning example of NGO-speak, by the World Bank:

“Based on the concluding session of the EPIAM workshop, the EPIAM project will refocus its agenda on issues related to Tools, Capacity, and Participation of EPIAM (instead of its current focus on Standards, Methodologies and Tools for EPIAM).”

Here are some more vapid, mind-numbing and banal euphemisms and platitudes: empowering, disadvantaged, positive means of expression etc.

All this can be construed as harmless and even funny, but it is not. Language is a means of communication, but it is also a tool of opacity and a weapon of power.

In the hands of an expert manipulator it is a way to immediately distant one-self from the others and impose a power-hierarchy.

George Orwell, who knew a thing or two about the English language and about the tyranny of the powerful, wrote that political language was “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

His novel 1984 clearly showed how language was used to brainwash the public and in an age when technology is supposed to make our lives simpler, we are irreversibly moving towards his horrifying prediction.

Thus, the power structure, including the politician, thebureaucrat and the NGO can go on and on about the need to involve stakeholder in a project, but in actual fact, the poor slum dweller whose shanty will be turned into a skyscraper may not be part of the decision-making at all.

Phrases like horizontal mainstreaming, civil society, diversity or that dreaded one, multi-cultural hide many sins? Similarly, the ad-man’s and marketing guru’s impressive sounding jargon will not tell you that the product is no good and the back-end service even worse.

Some of the perpetrators one can vote out — others are entrenched firmly in our socio-economic fabric. In our Brave New Consumerist Paradise, the question is definitely who is to be the master.

Email: sidharth01@dnaindia.net