Lucy Kellaway used to write a lot about this, in regards to corporate communications. It was hilarious, and a little depressing too. My first "real" job involv

Lucy Kellaway used to write a lot about this, in regards to corporate communications. It was hilarious, and a little depressing too. My first "real" job involved writing a lot of reports. And I found out, to my initial surprise, that all the reports were copy and pasted from other reports. I remember doing my first report, and my boss pretty much lost his mind (this was my first week...he called me an f'ing c@@t) when I suggested that the report could be cut down and made more suitable for the client. Ofc, my boss was semi-literate, terrified of writing, and the threat of litigation (this was a heavily regulated business, regulators would likely read these reports) held no horror relative to the threat of having to write (he also told me later that the longer the report, the less likely clients were to read it...he managed $100m of other people's money). Put briefly: people are afraid of having to think for themselves, it is easier to communicate in nonsense when the risk of other people finding out you don't know what you are doing is so emotionally severe. This goes all the way from the mail room to the board room. Words I hate: overuse of super (common in tech), leverage (outside of the financial meaning), learnings (very hot a few years ago but cooled significantly), huddle, staffer, analyst (presumably they will be calling my trashman a refuse transportation analyst at some point), revert, network (it still isn't okay)...I am sure there are more. Incidentally, one game I used to play at the above mentioned job was to sprinkle obscure but clever-sounding words in my conversations with my boss and see how many he would start using...simpler times, simple joys :)