Today, I am sleepy — or as my new viral “LinkedIn Speak” translator spun it, I am “honored to be prioritizing my well-being and practicing radical self-care by recharging my batteries,” because “in today’s fast-paced corporate landscape, recognizing the need for a strategic reset is a leadership superpower.”
Kagi, a Palo Alto, California-based search engine, has released a new “LinkedIn Speak” translating function that will instantly inject business buzzwords into your simple requests, making you sound like a corporate influencer selling your career story to impress people who will hire you. To use it, you simply type the phrase you want translated into Kagi’s translator tool and select “LinkedIn Speak” from the drop-down menu on the right.
In Kagi’s “LinkedIn Speak,” mundane life activities and alarming life consequences are transformed into corporate slop that makes everything a lesson. A large bowel movement becomes a “high-volume output optimization session,” while being arrested for fraud becomes a “unique opportunity to step back and reflect on my professional journey.” Kagi translates across more than 200 languages and also has a satirical “Corporate Jargon” option that produces results similar to “LinkedIn Speak.”
If you spend enough time on job boards and the professional networking site LinkedIn, you will recognize the hallmarks of the worst kind of business speech in Kagi’s “LinkedIn Speak”: confusing business acronyms that mean nothing, excessive metaphors and hashtags, and exploitations of one’s personal life for professional gain.
Trying to LinkedIn-Speakify your world can be fun for laughs, but don’t Kagi-fy everything. The humor speaks to a real problem of how alienating business buzzwords can sound.
People use this kind of performative language to fit in with their peers at work. One series of studies found that corporate jargon is a status signal, and professionals perceived to be higher-status are more likely to use it, which, in turn, makes low-status professionals more likely to copy them.
In the worst cases, this kind of language is not just jargon for insiders, but is simply “corporate bullshit,” which a new Cornell University study defines as “a type of semantically, logically or epistemically dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative or otherwise engaging.”
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The researchers used a generator to create corporate bullshit phrases like “a renewed level of adaptive coherence and culture fit in the market” and “cross-collateralization and blue-sky thinking” to test how receptive employees are to this kind of language.
Overall, out of the 1,000 adults surveyed, those who were impressed by corporate bullshit were not the best decision-makers. They were more likely to report lower scores on analytical and open-minded thinking.
Let that be a cautionary tale for people seeking to use “LinkedIn Speak” in their everyday life. Use it for laughs, but please don’t use it for real.
