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).