Recently I have been talking with my IT colleagues about the overuse of phrases that sound highly insightful but are ambiguous or even have no meaning at all to the normal person. Many of us have been in meetings or participated on conference calls and have heard (or even used ourselves) terms like “creating synergy”, “facilitated discussion” or my recent favorite “human bandwidth” and have scratched our heads thinking “what in the world are we talking about”!

Many of these terms have evolved over the past years based loosely on the influx of business books and white collar executives who believe that the use of these terms make us sound more engaged or smart. The ability to take a word like “bandwidth” which typically is used in the context of discussing network traffic and equating it to the amount of work a “person” can accomplish is pretty insightful. But the problem is that in everyday discussion, it makes us sound like we are just making stuff up to sound important. There are those folks that overuse this type of language to the point that they become a mockery (I’m sorry I mean… a joke!) to their peers and managers.

Don’t get me wrong. I realize the business language must have a sense of “flair” especially if you work in the tech sector, and let’s face it sometimes we need these cool sounding terms to make us appear to know more than we really do. But over use of things like “human capital” or “collaborative synergy” in our writing or discussions only leads to a lot of misunderstood directives that create disharmony in our organizations or another words “upset or frustrate the people we work with”!

I am not saying we should abandon all use of the terms sometimes it is unavoidable. But when we purposely add these words to our everyday vocabulary there are a large majority of folks, typically those of us who have been a round a bit, who dismiss the speaker as and assume they have no “real” knowledge of the subject they are speaking about.

So before you throw out that obscure reference that you think describes the situation in great detail, try to remember not everyone is impressed by the number of big words you can reference but in the substance of what you are actually saying. Sometimes it’s simply better to use words like “time”, “review” and “rule” instead of words like “cycle”, “assessment” and “guidepost”.