How do buzzwords get started?

How do buzzwords get started in the first place? The one I’ve been noticing lately is the word “engaged” being thrown around like “moving forward” was a year ago and like “value added” seems to be ingrained deep into people’s business-speak right now. I am genuinely curious where this shit gets started. Moreover, I am curious why people can’t just talk normally or use regular words. I have wondered if some of it has to do with a type of built in magical thinking about words and how they can effect the world around us. Buzzwords seem almost like a chant in some ways, that if you keep repeating one it will somehow make the idea of that word turn into whatever action you think the word has. Of course, the problem with that is that usually the words have radically different meanings to every person. The person using “engaged’ probably picked that up in some management book or journal or blog, which is fine (I guess). It’s good that people read. They definitely will have an idea about what they think that word means. If they walk out the door in the morning and just start using that word with other people without context or meaning then the other people probably will recognize that there is this new word in the day-to-day conversation. More than likely the listeners will try to quickly determine what the person is trying to mean by the word, but they will only have their own backgrounds to go with for drumming up some meaning. For example, when I see the word “engaged” I don’t think “Ah, they want me to be mentally and emotionally involved in my word and give a damn about it.” No, I think Patrick Stewart saying “Engage!”. Every time. That isn’t going away. When I DO try to separate it, instead of this idea of employee enthusiasm I instead think of mechanical engagement, such as one sprocket wheel in a great big machine being dropped down into a larger cog. I end up with this weird Patrick Stewart voice gigantic steam punk machine in my head, not “I am a fulfilled, satisfied employee that loves his work.” If anything, I start to get the idea of being trapped in a meaningless clockwork that I can escape and soon I will be a ground down gear that has to be replaced. “Engaged” probably seemed like a good idea at the time that the person wrote it. They may have had some similar idea about “Engaged like a spring in the clockwork! The clock doesn’t work if one spring isn’t engaged! Our company is like a fine tuned clock that needs for all the springs to be engaged for it to server its purpose of telling time!” Not that you couldn’t take Patrick Stewart’s TNG “Engage!” and go places with that too. Still, buzzwords are really more like a type of magical thinking from my perspective. I know that many common phrases we use now we once themselves buzzwords, but because of their overuse over time they have lost their magic and now they have no impact. They are no longer sparkling magic words that no one was using yesterday and now mysteriously is being used today and that I need to sit down and determine “What the fuck does he mean ‘engaged’? What is that? What the hell is ‘added value’? Are we the 99 cent service desk now? I don’t get it.”

In many ways, that is the challenge of managing people I suppose. To get them to do something FOR you that you might explain and that they might not care about except insofar as it means they get paid, get to keep their job, get their work done. While some folks believe magic exist (I don’t, btw, it goes with my not believing in things) and that it might work exactly the way I describe, the fact that new buzzwords have to come up and people are constantly searching for new ways to “motivate” people, I suspect there is nothing magical about buzzwords. It really is just the fact that the word is novel more than anything else, and after a while the magic of newness goes away. Getting people to care as much as you do about something, though, absolutely that would be magic if it were as easy as simply using a few new words. People keep trying too. Otherwise the magic words wouldn’t keep popping up.

The funny thing is, sometimes words can do exactly this, but most often it isn’t the words, but how they are said. It isn’t the incantation, it’s the recitation of the incantation that makes the magic happen. I am reminded of one of my old favorite 80s movies, Fright Night (emphasis is mine):

Peter Vincent: [brandishing a crucifix] Back, spawn of Satan!
Jerry Dandrige: [chuckles] Oh, really?
[Dandridge grabs the cross, crushes it, and throws it aside]
Jerry Dandrige: You have to have faith for this to work on me!

i.e. the “powers” that people want from spells and incantations won’t work if you don’t believe them. Or, in the case of a manager, if you aren’t sincere. Most people can smell insincerity a mile away. Worse than insincerity is the glass eyed stare of not just sincerity but obsession. The idea that someone’s entire life is all about some shitty job where you are basically shifting bits of paper around, that doesn’t produce the disgust that insincerity generates, that produces the raised eyebrow of skeptical fear.

Once again, this goes back to what so much of everything in the world seems to go back to: balance. If you find the special balance between words, speech, action, feeling, etc. then you probably end up being more charismatic along with being seen as sincere but not crazy. But just throwing the words you read or heard around like THAT is the idea itself and that saying it will spread the idea like a virus, well… good luck kid. The words aren’t magic.