Should we use jargon?

这是一个为你精心准备的英语学习笔记，旨在帮助你掌握“职场黑话”（Business Jargon）这一有趣且实用的主题。

📘 英语学习笔记：Should we use jargon?

1. 核心导读 (Introduction)

在本期节目中，我们将深入探讨职场中随处可见的术语（Jargon）。你会了解到：

• 为什么人们讨厌术语却又在日常工作中频繁使用。
• 术语如何被用来淡化负面消息的冲击。
• 曾经被视为术语的词汇（如 finalise）是如何演变为普通词汇的。

2. 重点词汇释义 (Key Vocabulary)

3. 精彩选段与解析 (Transcript Highlights)

• 关于“利益相关者”的伪装：

  “Most often when you’re referring to a stakeholder, I think people usually are referring to themselves… ‘We need to consider key stakeholders in this decision for everyone to come back in the office five days a week.’ What that means is, well, I’ve grown rather accustomed to my Friday morning yoga and I don’t want to be back in the office.” 解析： 术语有时被用来将个人需求包装成公司整体利益，使其听起来更“专业”。

• 术语的“去意义”功能：

  “A lot of the time when that’s used, it’s to remove meaning… for example, ‘rightsizing’. So, it’s removing some of the pain and removing some of the meaning behind things to seem innocuous.” 解析： 公司常用中性词汇（如 rightsizing 代替 firing）来减轻负面消息的道德负担和情感冲击。

• 语言的演变：

  “One of the things that you see is that there is language that used to be considered jargon that now we don’t even notice. And a great example of that is the verb ‘finalise’ which in the late 1960s was seen as bureaucratic jargon.” 解析： 今天的“黑话”可能就是明天的普通英语。语言总是在不断演化和被接受。

4. 学习思考 (Critical Thinking)

1. 术语是否真的提高了沟通效率？ 还是说它只是建立了一种“圈内人”的归属感？
2. 你所在的行业有哪些最让你反感的术语？ 它们是否也在试图掩盖某些真实意图？

🎧 听力原文 (Transcript)

Phil: Hello and welcome to Learning English for Work and our special series all about jargon. I’m Phil.

Pippa: And I’m Pippa. In this series, we’ve been talking about some of the strange words and phrases we use at work: business jargon.

Phil: As we’ve mentioned in the series, lots of people find jargon annoying or difficult to understand, so today, we’re going to look more at why we use jargon and whether it’s helpful in our working lives.

Pippa: Find a transcript for this episode to read along on our website, bbclearningenglish.com.

Phil: Now, earlier this year, we made a programme all about jargon with our colleagues at Business Daily, a BBC World Service business series. Their reporter Ed Butler spoke to Anna Maloney, a journalist at the London financial newspaper City AM. And Anna’s been writing a new column highlighting a different piece of corporate jargon each week.

Ed Butler: So, Anna. Let’s just pick up the paper.

Anna Maloney: Yeah.

Ed Butler: So what’ve we got here?

Anna Maloney: Today we’re highlighting stakeholder which I think is a particularly insidious one.

Pippa: Anna’s jargon of the week is stakeholder. Now, this means anyone who’s involved in a company and has an interest in it being successful. So employees are stakeholders, but also the people who own the company are stakeholders, the customers, the clients, all of those kinds of people. But Anna says the word stakeholder has become jargon. She calls it insidious, which means it is gradually causing harm.

Anna Maloney: Most often when you’re referring to a stakeholder, I think people usually are referring to themselves. You know, we need to consider key stakeholders in this decision for everyone to come back in the office five days a week. What that means is, well, I’ve grown rather accustomed to my Friday morning yoga and I don’t want to be back in the office.

Ed Butler: Exactly. You’ve been doing this column for nine months, right?

Anna Maloney: Yes.

Ed Butler: How do people respond to it? Your readers?

Anna Maloney: This has been one feature that our readers have really engaged with. They’re our biggest culprits, but also the biggest haters and I think this is a key feature. You know, we all love to hate it. But, statistically, you know, some of us are also… we’re using it every day.

Phil: Anna says that readers of the newspaper really enjoy the column. But those readers are the same people who use the jargon Anna writes about all the time at work. So, we’ve got here people are complaining about this jargon, but actually they’re the ones who use it.

Pippa: Yes. I think we’re all guilty of that, Phil. So, often we’ve talked about bits of jargon in this series that we find annoying, but we also use them. And sometimes you actually hear someone complaining about jargon, or a certain phrase they don’t like, and then they use a load of jargon just to… to talk about what they don’t like about it. So it’s everywhere. It’s kind of part of our everyday language at work.

Phil: OK, so we had deep dive, which is where you look at something in detail.

Pippa: Yeah. We had cascade. Somebody suggested this. This is where you pass on information. So, somebody at the top of the organisation sends it to a few people and then they cascade it, they send it to their employees and down the chain of command, as it were.

Phil: And then you have synergy, which is when everyone is working well together, possibly because the information has been well cascaded to them. And it’s this idea that working together is more powerful than everyone working on their own.

Pippa: And interestingly, some commenters said that they’re now retired, but reading all the examples on the Facebook post made them feel quite stressed, so maybe part of why we dislike this language is because it reminds us of work and any stress associated with the world of work.

Phil: So, another common criticism of jargon is that it’s vague. So, it’s difficult to know for sure what someone’s talking about.

Pippa: Yeah, and I spoke to John Fiset who is an expert in workplace culture and language dynamics from Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia in Canada. And John believes that some jargon used by businesses is deliberately difficult to understand.

John Fiset: One of the interesting things about this corporate jargon or corporate… ‘corporatese’ or however you want to say it, is a lot of the time when that’s used, it’s to remove meaning. For example, like, you’re being fired. No, we’re having a corporate downsizing or a rightsizing now, that’s how they’re using these terms. So, it’s again removing some of the pain and removing some of the meaning behind things to seem innocuous. A lot of these terms are meant to kind of mask the real intent behind some of the decisions that are being made and, for that matter, make people sound a little smarter than they… than they are.

Phil: John is concerned that people are using ‘corporatese’, that’s corporate language, to make what they’re saying seem innocuous or harmless.

Pippa: Yes, and we talked about this in our series Office English. We mentioned some of the language used at work to talk about bad news, and it’s not always clear.

Phil: So, John mentioned ‘downsizing’ and ‘rightsizing’. People don’t like these terms, but also people don’t like losing their jobs. It’s a difficult thing for us to talk about.

Pippa: So, I spoke to Anne Curzan, Professor of English language at the University of Michigan, who thinks that sometimes we love to hate jargon just a bit too much.

Anne Curzan: One of the things that you see is that there is language that used to be considered jargon that now we don’t even notice. And a great example of that is the verb ‘finalise’ which in the late 1960s was seen as bureaucratic jargon. It was criticised and really quite soundly disliked and over time over the past few decades, the criticism has declined. And at this point when I tell people that that verb used to be considered jargon, they’re often surprised because it doesn’t feel jargon-y at all. But ‘incentivise’ feels very jargon-y.

Phil: Anne says we often find new words annoying at work. But over time they become normal.

Pippa: Yeah, and this is true of other language change, too. For example, lots of people use new words and phrases on social media, and some people find this annoying or say that the new expressions aren’t proper English, but usually we get used to them over time.

Phil: Yes, new language does often get criticised.

Pippa: And Anne also thinks that our dislike of business jargon in particular could demonstrate what we think about business more generally.

Anne Curzan: Honestly, I think there may also be a deeper concern reflected in criticisms of business jargon about the role of business in our society and there certainly are people who are worried that corporate culture and business generally has taken on an outsized role socially. And that may again get reflected in complaints about business jargon.

Phil: Anne says some people are concerned that corporate culture has an outsized role in our society. That means that the world of work and business is too big a part of our lives.

Pippa: Lots of people criticise jargon, but as Anne Curzan said, gradually, we start to use new jargon terms and then eventually we don’t even think of them as jargon anymore.

Phil: So yeah, in this series, we hope we’ve helped you understand more strange jargon, what it means and when to use it.

Pippa: That’s it for this episode of Learning English for Work. We’re taking a break over Christmas and New Year, but we’ll be back with more episodes next year.

Phil: Until then, find loads more resources to help you with your English on our website. Bye for now.

Pippa: Bye.

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