Nietzsche's
On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873) makes
swift, excoriating work of language as a whole, but it exactly
predicts the extravagant inanity of garbage language:
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and
anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations which have
been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and
rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and
obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has
forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and
without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now
matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
He proposed (I'd argue) that we just give up on functional speech
altogether -- drop the charade that our personal realities share a
common language. Choosing to speak poetically (by which he meant
intentionally calling things what they are not) was his ironic
solution. Language is always a matter of intention. No two people
could have less in common than when they are saying the same thing,
one sincerely and one with snark. And so with every exchange, you have
to acknowledge a reality where words like
optionality and
deliverable could be just as solid as
blimp and
pretzel. What happens if you ask a Megan or a Steph Korey or an
Adam Neumann what they mean? I imagine a box with a series of false
bottoms; you just keep falling deeper and deeper into gibberish. The
meaningful threat of garbage language -- the reason it is not just
annoying but malevolent -- is that it confirms delusion as an asset in
the workplace.