Corporate language exists to make a decision sound like weather

This looks at corporate euphemism from the practical end — what holds up once conditions stop being ideal.

The passive voice removes the person who decided

Difficult decisions have been taken is a complete sentence containing no information about who took them or why. The construction is grammatically ordinary and rhetorically enormous, because it moves the decision from something a person did to something that occurred.

Readers process the sentence as an event rather than an act, which measurably reduces the impulse to ask who is answerable for it. The same content written actively would name a leadership team and a rationale, which is precisely the version that generates follow-up questions. Once you start noticing the missing subject, most internal communications read like descriptions of the weather in a building.

Nominalisation is the second trick

Turning a verb into a noun converts an action into a thing, so people are not made redundant, a redundancy programme exists. A thing has no actor and no tense, which makes it much harder to argue with than a sentence about somebody doing something to somebody.

Consultation, realignment, optimisation and transition all perform this move, and all of them describe activities carried out by identifiable people. The vocabulary is not accidental, since communications teams draft these announcements carefully and the drafts go through review. A reasonable test is to try rewriting a paragraph with a human subject at the front of every sentence and see how much survives.

Some of the vagueness is legal caution rather than cowardice

Announcements about employment, restructuring or financial performance carry genuine legal exposure, and specific promises create obligations. Language is therefore reviewed to avoid statements that could be read as a commitment, a guarantee or an admission. That produces the same fog as evasion does, which is why it is worth separating the two rather than assuming bad faith everywhere.

Once the introductory rate lapses, the tell is usually consistency, because legal caution is uniform while evasion is selective about which facts get blurred. An announcement that is precise about the strategy and vague only about the consequences is not being cautious.

Jargon as a membership badge

Specialist vocabulary genuinely speeds up communication between people who share it, which is why every trade develops some. The problem starts when the vocabulary spreads beyond the people it was compressing anything for and becomes a signal of belonging.

At that point the words are doing social work rather than semantic work, and their meaning quietly drifts to whatever the room assumes. Terms like alignment, bandwidth and capacity survive because they can absorb any meaning, which makes them useless and unkillable.

The reliable diagnostic is whether a term could be replaced with a plain phrase without loss, and most of them can.

Why it survives every attempt to kill it

Plain-language initiatives are announced regularly and almost always fail, because the incentives that produced the language are untouched. Being vague is low risk, being specific is high risk, and the difference in outcome for the individual writer is entirely one-sided. A manager who says a project will ship in March can be wrong in March, while one who says it is progressing well never can be.

Until being unclear costs something, clarity remains an act of personal exposure rather than a professional standard. The organisations that do achieve it usually did so by having a senior person publicly rewrite things, which is a costly and unpopular method.

Practices change, and a company that does this today may have quietly stopped by the time you read it.

Reading it faster

Look for the sentences with a named subject, because those carry the actual content and there are usually very few of them. Note what is quantified, since numbers survive editing better than adjectives and a paragraph without any is generally not saying much. Watch for the word unfortunately, which reliably precedes the only consequential sentence in an otherwise cheerful announcement.

Check what question the document is answering, and whether it is the question everyone reading it actually had. The gap between those two is where the real message lives, and it is usually the whole reason the document was long.

The takeaway

Find the sentences with a subject, because that is where the news is.

The fix is usually trivial, which is the most annoying part.