Let’s leverage blockchain to democratise synergy and other linguistic nonsense

If somebody came to you and claimed that their weight was a nice green colour, you would probably stop, double-check if you heard them correctly, and then wonder if that person was sane. What a piece of nonsense!

Just because something sounds like a sentence and has the structure of a sentence doesn’t mean it must automatically have meaning.

And yet, in the corporate world, we often hear busy white-collar professionals utter similar kinds of nonsense.

“Let’s dockerize the monolith to make it cloud-native.” Sure, and while we’re at it, let’s staple a horse to a spaceship to make it more agile.

Or when Mike from Innovation Labs calls for “leveraging blockchain to democratize synergy.” That’s just a pile of nouns desperately trying to form a startup pitch.

But in the entrepreneurial world of wannabe innovators, sentences like these get nodded at, printed on slides, and repeated in meetings without a hint of irony.

“We need to action this ask.” You mean… do the thing someone asked for? Why not just say that?

In linguistics, sentences like these are usually described as category mistakes (or category errors).

🔍 Category Mistake

A category mistake occurs when someone attributes a property to something that cannot possibly have that property—because it belongs to a completely different category of things. Like when they say: “The number seven is jealous.” or “The theory of relativity is eating lunch.”

These sentences are syntactically correct (they follow the rules of grammar), but semantically nonsensical—because the meanings don’t align. We’re mixing incompatible categories: “number” (a measurable quantity) with “jealous” (a sensory property).

“Let’s make these wireframes more emotional”

And we, designers, are not spared from these linguistic blunders either. Just recently, I heard someone suggesting we “make the wireframe more emotional.” → Wireframes are skeletal, structural layouts—not emotional experiences. That’s like asking scaffolding to feel romantic.

Or saying that “This hamburger menu needs more trust.” → Maybe the users don’t trust it, but the menu itself doesn’t have feelings, intentions, or moral integrity.

“Can we make the hierarchy more delicious?” → Hierarchy is about visual structure and priorities, not about taste buds. Unless you’re designing a menu for a restaurant… and even then, proceed with caution.

Why Do Designers (and Stakeholders) Make Category Mistakes?

Over the years, I’ve heard my fair share of these linguistic blunders, which made me start thinking—why does it happen to us? And why does it happen even to smart people?

When I was doing my research on this, I learned that most category mistakes arise from one of the following reasons:

• Metaphorical overreach (trying to express intuition through poetic but inaccurate language)
• Wishful thinking (wanting inanimate artifacts to behave like humans)
• Buzzword overload (using emotional or ethical language to describe visual or structural things)
• Emotional intuition without linguistic precision

I’m going to break them down more thoroughly in another post.

About the author

Martin Tutko is a product designer by trade and a part-time philosopher by hobby. Thinking, researching and doing design since 1998. And as of 2023 also sharing and writing about some of my experiences as a product designer 🧑🏻‍💻🌟