By Jonathan Justus | jonnynow.com | 1 July 2026
Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
The words we reach for to sound clever may be the very ones giving us away. In a study published in Personality and Individual Differences in February 2026, Cornell researcher Shane Littrell introduced the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale after asking more than 1,000 office workers to rate the "business savvy" of statements — some real quotes from Fortune 500 leaders, some computer-generated nonsense. The workers most impressed by phrases like "synergising paradigms" scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making. Worse still, those most likely to fall for empty jargon were also the most likely to spread it.
That finding lands in a workplace already tired of the noise. A Duolingo and LinkedIn study of more than 8,000 professionals across eight countries found that 58% believe their colleagues overuse jargon, and nearly half would happily see it disappear altogether — because decoding it causes stress and slows the work down. Jargon, in other words, is not a harmless quirk of office life. It is a tax on everyone's attention, and the bill is rising.
Jargon Is a Confidence Trick — On Ourselves
We tend to assume buzzwords are aimed outward, deployed to impress a client or dazzle a board. Littrell's work suggests the deeper damage is internal. When we dress a thin idea in "holistic value creation" or "operationalising our north star", we lose the ability to notice that the idea was thin to begin with. Vague language does not just hide weak thinking from others; it hides weak thinking from ourselves. The professional who cannot say plainly what they mean often cannot see plainly what they mean, and the two failures reinforce each other until nobody in the room is quite sure what was decided.
Clarity Is Now the Scarce Resource
The irony of 2026 is that we have never communicated more and understood less. Axios HQ's 2026 State of Internal Communications report found that 81% of respondents say their organisation's messages lack consistency across channels — up sharply from 69% a year earlier — while 72% admit they have felt out of the loop on important information in the past year. Volume has soared, helped along by tools that generate polished paragraphs on demand, but comprehension has not kept pace. In a flood of words, the person who can be understood in one reading holds an unfair advantage. Clarity has quietly become the rarest and most valuable professional skill.
Key statistic: 58% of professionals say their colleagues overuse jargon, and nearly half would remove it entirely because it causes stress and slows work down. (Duolingo & LinkedIn, 2025)
How to Practise Plain Speaking
The cure is not dumbing down; it is precision. Before you send, translate every abstract noun into something a newcomer could picture: swap "leverage cross-functional synergies" for "get the sales and product teams talking". Read your message aloud — if you stumble, so will your reader. Ask of each sentence, "What would this look like if it were true?" and if you cannot answer, the sentence is decoration, not information. Strong communicators treat every buzzword as a debt to be repaid in concrete meaning. The habit takes practice, but it compounds: teams that speak plainly decide faster, trust more, and waste less of one another's time.
This is the muscle that separates people who merely fill the air from those whose words actually move work forward. In an economy drowning in content, the professionals who prize clarity over cleverness will be the ones others choose to listen to.
Master Professional Communication with Elevana
Cutting jargon and communicating with clarity is a learnable discipline, not a personality trait. Elevana's PRO Communicator programme helps professionals sharpen their writing, speaking and listening so their meaning lands the first time — building the plain-spoken credibility that fast-moving teams and clients reward.
Say less, mean more — and let clarity do the persuading.
