Is jargon really all just gibberish? How long have
we been maximizing our synergies? And does legal testimony have anything to do with testicles?
We'll take a bona fide look at the insufferable language of business and the interesting innuendos
of legal jargon on today's Words Unravelled. [Music]
Welcome to another Words Unravelled. I'm Rob Watts from the YouTube channel
Rob Words, and I'm Jess Zafarris, author of the etymology books Once Upon a Word and Words from
Hell. As key stakeholders in today's podcast, it's incumbent upon us to recognize and leverage jargon
and gauge whether these terms are a net value-add to our lexical toolbox. Isn't that right?
Yes, yes, I think so. Not sure I fully understood, but let's run a few things up the flagpole,
shall we? Perhaps even open the kimono? Yes! We can determine whether these
are loss-makers or 800lb gorillas. Exactly, yes. We're talking corporate jargon,
in case you haven't already picked up on that. I feel so dirty.
Well, so have you spent much time in, like, the corporate world? Have
you come across a lot of this stuff in reality? Yes, unfortunately. The way I make the majority
of my income is sadly not through word origins but through working with agencies and in the marketing
world. People love to throw around these terms. In fact, a lot of the work that I do is trying
to dejargonize a lot of the work they put out. And is this done ironically? Is
there irony behind these usages, or are people using these terms in all sincerity?
In many cases, no irony whatsoever. I mean, there's a little—like when somebody says synergy,
sometimes there's a little wink-nudge—but, like, not as much as you would hope.
Well, for me, I'm sort of relying on what other people tell me are common terms in
the corporate world, because I've only really worked in pubs and in newsrooms for the past,
you know, decade and a half. Journalists have their very own style of jargon but are very
resistant to corporate jargon, I would say. Ours are better, right?
Absolutely. And all these sort of strange terms that journalists
use that no one else does—like floral tributes when people just mean flowers. I really hate
that one. I don't know if that was caught on your side of the Atlantic, but that's a big one.
Anyway, that's not what we're here to talk about. We're talking about corporate jargon—maybe
a bit of legalese later on. But let's start off with jargon and the word itself, because
it's got a rather cute etymology, I think. Yeah, it actually is quite cute. It's from
French, as they often are—a 14th-century word. It's been around for a long time; people
have been using the term jargon for a while. It originally meant unintelligible talk or
gibberish, or, like, chattering or jabbering. Yeah, it evokes the sounds of birds chattering,
right? It’s sort of a twittering of birds that it originally meant. It also gives the same sense
as the word barbarian, almost, where the root is meant to imitate unintelligible talk, essentially.
Right, right, exactly. And how does it match up with what it means today?
Well, I suppose if you're going to take the bird analogy, it's kind of—it's the sort of
wittering away that can only be understood by the people that are doing it, and it's complete
gibberish to everyone outside of it, I think. Which is, yeah, certainly a property of corporate
jargon. By the way, I won’t get too deeply into this, but I was just looking into other
words for jargon and words related to jargon, and that French word jargon—whatever—there are
relatives of it across the Romance languages. But I found a Spanish one: jerigonza. I'm
sure I'm saying that badly. Jerigonza. And that's related to the word jargon.
Oh yes, that would make sense. I'm, like, trying to spell this in my head now. Now
I see the connection—it begins with a J, right? However I pronounce it, it begins with a J. But
jerigonza is a Spanish version of Pig Latin—it’s a made-up language.
Oh, no kidding. Yeah, and what it entails is putting a P sound
after every syllable. It is extremely difficult to perform and doesn’t really work with
English. But, for example, the word hola (hello) would be hopolapa. If you wanted to say
cómo estás (how are you?), it would be ... I’ve written these down because I can’t come
up with these off the top of my head, but como estas is copomopo epestapas And the response yopo epestopoy bipiopen would be...
Yope. Well, that’s fun.
Yeah! There’s this obscure hit from about—I don’t know—20 years ago, which is just a little
girl talking entirely in jerigonza in this song. I would encourage people to look it up. Look up that
term, and it’s the first thing that will come up. That’s adorable.
It is adorable. Speaking of which, like, jargon languages are
a thing. Like, that is a linguistic term. Um, linguistic jargons are, like, sort of specialized
linguistic survival kits—condensed vocabularies, i.e., within regions or trades—like a cross
between a pidgin and a lingua franca. One of the more common ones is Chinook Jargon, which
is a trade language that combines, like, uh, North American Indigenous languages, uh,
English, and French, and it was used for, like, trade and commerce.
I see. Okay, so what have these terms got in common with what we,
like, more commonly refer to as jargon? I suppose it, again, it's a sort of language
that is understandable to the people that use it but doesn't necessarily mean
an awful lot to people beyond that. Mhm. It's funny—there's another little connection
here. In the early 2000s, there were, like, some tongue-in-cheek instances of the word jargonaut,
which is, uh, someone who uses too much jargon. So today we are—we are jargonauts, I suppose.
There's a whole new set of jargon surrounding modern technologies like AI and such, but there
are a few sort of mainstays I was looking at. Um, so a few years back—about a decade ago—Forbes
got into the habit of, every year, doing a sort of tournament of jargon where they would face
off two jargonistic terms against each other, and people on Twitter would vote for one to get
through. And then they'd get through to the next round, and then that would, uh, go head-to-head
with another jargonistic term. And the only one that I could find—the entirety of the entire, um,
tournament, I suppose—was, I think it was from 2012 or something like that, in which the winning
jargonistic term was drinking the Kool-Aid. Oh yeah, that'll do it.
Mhm. It doesn’t make an awful lot of sense in the UK. We obviously—we obviously understand the
reference, um, that—that is made, the very dark reference that’s made there. The fact that that
one has persisted is—is pretty brutal, isn’t it? Yeah, I mean, it really is. It really is. And
it won this competition—this Jargon Madness, as Forbes were calling it—by
beating leverage in the final, having defeated empower, open the kimono, core
competency, and move the needle in the process. I would say leverage and utilize are the words
that I have to edit out of corporate folks' stuff, uh, as—as frequently as anything else.
So, I guess you just replace utilize with use every time, right? Anything else
but use is perfectly, perfectly good. There's no reason to say utilize when use works.
And leverage—what's weird about leverage, there's something odd going on with how that word’s being
used. Because what it is, is a noun being, uh, being used as a verb, right? To leverage
something. We have leverage, and therefore we are going to leverage something, i.e., we're
going to turn something into leverage or to—to make the most of the leverage that we have.
I have a lot of journalistic, uh, journalism friends who will, um, and former colleagues,
uh, from my time at Adweek, who were, um, generally—they would say that they were
against the verbing of nouns. But then I, you know, I'd be like, well, here are, like,
ten examples of other nouns that we have verbed, and it works perfectly well. Leverage and other,
you know, "-ize" modernizations and neologisms just happen to sound particularly obnoxious
because of the way they are overused, I think. Yeah, the ones that wind people up: uh, to table,
which we talked about before as being a contronym as well, because that can either mean to take
something off the table or to put something on the table. And also to impact. People don’t
like that. They don’t like it when you say it impacts something to mean it affects something.
That’s one—I, I have a whole rant about this that I will save for perhaps another day or context.
But that one is—is one of those that’s overused by, uh, AI chatbots in particular. So, um,
although I think it once had impact, um, it’s been defanged to the extent that people
will say, um, you know, this generated, uh, significant impact. That’s one of those phrases
that you’re like, oh, a bot wrote this. And it’s because, typically, when you find it in
AI-generated copy, there’s no, uh, concrete description of what impact has been generated.
I actually noticed this coming up a lot in editorial situations. So in script writing,
in news as well, the word impact would find its way in because it was an easy way to
get out of actually having to talk about precisely what effect had been had. You just
say it impacts it, and you don’t even really have to go to cause and effect. It’s, I—it’s,
uh, quite lazy and absolutely worth avoiding. You’ve got nouns turned into verbs, but
you’ve also got verbs turned into nouns, right? One that I do hear is people
talking about learnings that they’ve made. Learnings, yes. I’m hoping there will be many
learnings from this episode of Words Unraveled. By the way, I did look into that,
and it’s one of those ones that’s, you know, really old, uh, actually. Because
Shakespeare uses it in Cymbeline. He—he says, the king puts to him all the learnings that
his time could make him the receiver of. So this is the thing: like, a lot of these
jargon terms are not—were not originally jargon, or belonged to a different context
of jargon. Um, I’d say, like, the patron saint of every corporate jargon
term is synergy, but that’s a very old word. You told me about this. I can’t
believe how old this word is. I was looking, yeah. There’s quotes
from the 1600s: The virtue of which synergies and co-partnership with Christ
and with God as he saveth, so we saveth. Yes, it’s biblical.
Yeah. Amazing, isn’t it? It means the
same thing as collaboration. Collaboration, yeah.
Collaboration, also. Synergy is working together.
In Greek, it has portmanteau energy. It does, it absolutely does. But it turns
out it—it isn’t—it’s particularly found in First Corinthians. We are fellow workers,
which in Greek was synergoi with God, saying, like, you are—you are God’s cultivation, God’s
building. And it was the theological principle that ended up saying, oh, over the years,
collaboration or working together is divine. I see. And, of course, of course,
corporate culture picked up the idea that collaboration is divine.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, right? There's no way that the corporate culture
has been reading Shakespeare and said, "Oh, we're having that learnings word," or they've
been reading the Bible and said, "Oh, synergy, I like that, I like that." But now you can
have synergies. Of course, that's worse. Yeah, which is observably worse. Isn't this funny,
Jess? You and I are so laissez-faire normally about language, but this stuff gets our backs up,
doesn't it? It—it itches in all the wrong ways. And it's because it's so, like—it's so cliché
and uncreative, I believe. Like, whenever these terms are applied to—and overused and, um, I
don't know, almost misused—it dehumanizes them. That's it, isn't it? Because you know that
when such terms are used, no independent, original thought is behind it. It's that they've
grabbed a term rather than thinking of the best possible term. Impact is a really good
example of that. There are quite a few words where you just go, "Ah, okay, so they haven't
bothered to think of their own thing here." But also, I think it's also just a bit of a
sort of—how would you describe this—like, social signifier? People choosing to use these terms to
show that they're part of the club, and sometimes to keep people out of the club, so to speak.
Exactly. Etiquette, right? If you're not up to date with the latest terms, then
you're not really a part of it. This is—and again, like, it's not—it's, they're
nonspecific. Like, you again with those AI terms, the ones that it overuses include, like, delve
and foster and ensure and revolutionize, and it's because you can say those things and sound
as if you are describing something that actually happened while talking around it entirely.
The problem with this generative AI usage of these terms is that it will perpetuate it, because
eventually we're going to end up with a situation where we have lots of these AI-generated texts
using these words, and then they are providing fodder for the next generation of AI texts, which
are using them more. So these words are just going to get perpetuated even further.
I tell my students, if they are able to produce—they're not journalism students,
so they're producing different kinds of written work—I'm like, "If you can
make AI help you be more efficient, I support you. But if I read your work and I think
that it sounds like AI, that's not a compliment." Because it's like that George Carlin quote:
Think of how smart the average person is, and then remember that half of all
the population is dumber than that. Yeah. Which, I mean, I think that's
ungenerous, but I also love George Carlin. So I think AI writes pretty well, you know, in
terms of grammar and such. It's more or less flawless, right? But what it lacks, quite
obviously, is originality and humanity. I think—thank goodness—it sounds like the average
of every terrible LinkedIn post you've ever read. Yeah, although I think it has
above-average grammatical abilities. Yeah, I would—I would say that.
And that's because it's formulaic, and it thrives on formula. The text we put into it
becomes data, and the data is used to reassemble text into different, um, shapes, essentially.
Yeah, there you go. Some hot takes on AI from us. Hot take is probably a sort
of internet jargon, right? Is it internet jargon, or is it Gen Z jargon?
Cursed. I would think that's pre-Gen Z.
I think we were using—I think we Millennials were hot-taking back in the day.
Okay, that's us. That one's on us. Actually, I was looking at some other research that was
done by Preply, which is a tutoring platform, but they looked at corporate jargon that's
made it into everyday usage, and you realize, yeah, these kind of have done. Like, FYI always
started off as corporate jargon, and I think you do find people using that day-to-day.
I—I definitely used it. It's quite simple, it's quite efficient.
Yeah, yeah. I don't think I've necessarily made any friends.
I'm not proud of it, but I have used it. At the end of the day. People say that an
awful lot. You find talk about a win-win, being on the same page. Although they've
got—on this list, they've got circle back. Sense shuddering, isn't it?
What's your understanding of when someone says they’re going to circle back to
something? Does that mean they genuinely are? Uh, I don't—that sounds like an "I'm going
to put this off indefinitely" situation. Yeah. Isn't that what someone says to not
embarrass someone else in a group meeting? "Back on that one later."
Yeah. I think the more tolerable jargon terms—and it's probably simply because
we've gotten used to them, so maybe our disdain is a little misplaced—um, it's that, uh, it's the
ones that have translated to multiple contexts. So, like, we have a lot of sports terms that
have now become corporate jargon: touch base, drop the ball, ballpark projections,
Hail Marys, slam dunks, and blindsides. And those can often be used in non-corporate
contexts without getting too much side-eye. Yeah, we'll talk about the
really sort of egregious stuff this episode then. What other ones are there?
Oh, okay, okay, here's one: the use of the word solution in this peculiar—what feels like
a very modern—way that screams to me that you're going to sell me some enterprise software.
Exactly! But if you're a company that provides cleaning solutions, and I don't mean solutions
as in detergents, then what do you do? I mean, you do cleaning, right? You clean things. You
don't need to talk about solutions. Or transport solutions—you transport things. You know, I look
upon that word in corporate environments with the same skepticism I do the word revolutionize.
I'm like, did you really revolutionize it? Did you really solve the problem, and to what extent?
Or how about disrupt as well, which is exactly in the same ballpark as you just mentioned.
But yeah, to disrupt something—have you really disrupted something? Because the
use of the word disrupt is now so clichéd that it is, in itself, undisruptive.
By the way, do you know what the older version of the word disrupt is? By older
version, I mean it has the same etymology, but we don't use it so much anymore.
Well, I know it's a back-formation of disruption, much like a lot of those "-tion"
words, but what was its predecessor as a verb? I didn't know that! Okay, disrump is the
older version because rumpere is the root. You got it. So I would like us to start saying,
"We're going to disrump the industry now." It does sound like you're going to remove
the "rump" from it, but that's not what it means. But that's the same root as words
like corrupt, erupt, abrupt, and interrupt. Yeah, and the dis- at the start of there is not
a negative. It's one we've talked about before in words like distribute. It means to widely.
So to disrupt is to break apart, break asunder. Yeah, which is kind of funny because rump
means to break. The dis- on the front of it almost sounds like fixing it again.
Yeah, being duplicative. So to rupt and to disrupt could effectively mean the same thing.
That's interesting, actually. Yeah, because interrupt in French is interrompre,
which means "between the rumps." Here's one I had to look up, but I have
definitely seen on my LinkedIn feed and in people's descriptions of what
their organization does: vertical. Vertical is a word that was frequently used when I
was, uh, I was the audience engagement director at Adweek, because vertical is also a journalism
jargon term. A vertical is like either, um, a segment of a business that's on a particular
topic, or it can be like if you have multiple sections of a news organization's website that
are on different topics—like politics, culture, news—each one of those is said to be a vertical.
Right, so is what we're supposed to imagine that there is a sort of horizontal that is
going through all of the different sectors, and along that horizontal are loads of
verticals? You imagine vertical lines off, you know, off each one of those as an individual
sector. So if you serve the healthcare vertical, it’s—you are providing products or services
to the healthcare sector and not the others, whereas if you have a sort of horizontal
approach, you're basically supplying something that you're hoping everyone will buy, right?
Um, Adweek's horizontal is advertising. Adweek's verticals are creativity, ad agency news, ad tech.
I don’t like it. I don’t really either, that’s all I’ve got to say.
Yeah, I think I don’t like it because I didn’t quite understand it. But, uh, I don’t
know—it seems like an unnecessary term to call on. It’s a sort of metaphor, right?
That—that it feels quite exclusive too. I feel like I've been, I've been included in that one for
quite some time though, like, one of my previous organizations had a lot of different hor—or
didn’t have as much horizontal but had a lot of verticals, um, like writing and art and things.
Yeah, I mean, I'm already, to be honest, a little bit lost. Let’s move on.
How about we talk about stakeholders? Oh yeah, so they're not people who are ready to
stake vampires—they are people who are holding the stakes in gambling. Um, like the third party
who holds the cash while the game plays out. But in practicality, that word means what now?
It means anyone who's basically got an interest in something, right?
Exactly. Yeah. They, um, are—I mean, you could also say there’s a touch of gambling in
that context too, because you're basically betting on the business succeeding.
Oh yeah, okay. By investing in it, or having an
interest in it, or working for it, you are, uh, beholden to its success.
Okay, so you can think of that stake as, as, as, yeah, as a—a gambling stake.
What else have we got here? Have you got any more of the—I mean, I've got—actually,
I’ve got loads of them, I’m just trying to find out which one to go to next.
Well, let’s see. A lot of, uh, a lot of corporate terms have also come from legal
contexts. They've transcended that original context but also exist there too, sometimes
with a different meaning. Like, we—I would say in business environments I’ve heard people say
things like caveat and bona fide, for example. I, I—I’ve got a whole thing
here, actually, on legal Latin, which we should get into. I don’t know if you
want to get into that just yet, or if you want to stick in the corporate world for a little
bit longer because we clearly enjoy it so much. I mean—by the way, I mentioned open the kimono
earlier, which I haven’t come across terribly. I’ve only seen it on lists of corporate jargon,
I have to admit. But from what I could tell, it’s sort of casually calling on
the idea of flashing your genitals. Yeah, it—it definitely is. That's the idea. Like,
end of story. I don't—I don't know. I don't know. Um, I do—I do like, um, I don't like when people
use it necessarily, but I like the, uh, origin of 800lb gorilla, which I referenced in the intro.
It's from a joke: Where does an 800lb gorilla sit? I don't know. Where does an 800lb gorilla sit?
Anywhere it wants to. And the idea here is that, in corporate worlds and
also in military and political environments, it's an entity that has a majority percentage of the
market, so that competitors basically don't stand a chance. Like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are such
large entities that all other soda brands are seen as independent or so-called challenger brands.
I see. The modern forum for a lot of this—you've already mentioned it, I think, and
I've already mentioned it—is LinkedIn. Mhm. And wow, you don't have to scroll down
a feed on there very, very long to find not necessarily these terms specifically, but
a whole sort of parlance that doesn't exist outside of that platform and certainly outside of
the corporate world. Like, you see it in a lot of job titles that you don't come across otherwise,
like people referring to themselves as a something ninja or a something hacker or, uh, something
evangelist. I mean, what is a thought leader? Swiss Army knife, right?
Yeah. You and I are obviously thought leaders. That's what's going on here, for sure.
Influencers as well. Honestly, we should post this episode
to LinkedIn and see what happens. Oh my goodness, we’d get kicked off. Speaking
of odd job titles, while I was researching this, I just had a quick look on my LinkedIn—I don't
go on there very often, I have to admit. Um, I don't know why. I just don't. But I noticed
that one of my friends has got a new job, and their title is Head of Strategy and Execution.
Head of Execution feels like, uh, um, an oxymoron. Yeah. He will behead the head of execution.
Yeah, it's a reinsurance firm, so I'm not quite sure, and they should not say execution,
right? I’d say implementation or something. She—yeah, exactly. That sounds bad. That
sounds like a bad thing: I’m Head of Execution. I mean, yeah. Well, executing a strategy also
implies, like, halting it in its tracks, right? True. Yeah, cutting—cutting it off in its flow.
One of the other things I noticed about LinkedIn is the way that it sort of fluffs the egos
of people on there. Why am I getting—it turns out I’ve got all these opinions on
LinkedIn—but you’ll occasionally get a message from them, right? And it’ll say something
like, Your expertise is being requested. You go, and it makes you think, Oh! Oh, I’m—I’m
an expert in something! Someone wants my opinion! And what it actually is, is that LinkedIn has a
customer satisfaction survey for you to fill in. Or it says, You’re getting noticed, which just
means some people have visited your profile. But it’s very clever like that. People
are switching it up a little bit as it’s become obvious that a lot of what is on
LinkedIn is, like, empty cliché. Um, but are you familiar with the term for, like, the standard
LinkedIn post format? Um, where you do, like, one sentence, a space, one sentence, a space, then
you come around to your, like, corporate hot take? No.
It is called broetry. Oh, that’s excellent.
And don’t the posts usually end with, And everyone stood up and clapped, right?
Exactly. Usually after someone’s 8-year-old has said something very wise.
Oh, of course. Uh, I shouldn’t be—I feel like I shouldn’t be too down on the thing
here. What I have noticed about LinkedIn versus other platforms is it’s generally positive,
mostly. Like, people are upbeat on there, and that’s good. You know, they’re either talking
about their own achievements or they’re praising other people, which—which seems like a nice
thing compared to certain other platforms. For the moment. I have three or
four friends who do LinkedIn right, and I—I love the work that they do. One of
them is named Jayde I. Powell, and she has, like—she is a quote-unquote LinkedIn influencer
and makes income based on LinkedIn posts that she does. And it’s because they’re very casual, they
break out of these clichés. She’s just herself. Um, another one is, uh, Christina Garnett, who's,
like, launched a number of businesses through, um, her network on social media and
a number of other—and just her, like, excellent skillset. Um, and—and I—I think that
people who approach LinkedIn as humans, um, do—do better and are far less insufferable.
But that's what it is. It—yeah, approach it as humans. That's a rule for writing in general,
isn't it? To—to write like a person rather than trying to emulate the writing of—of someone else.
It's all that show, don't tell, uh, as it often comes down to. Jess and Rob's lesson for today.
Yes, indeed. Um, one—one corporate term that, uh, I actually do like—and I think it's because
of its other uses and perhaps because you get free stuff out of it—but, uh, it's swag. When
you're at a conference and you pick up whatever the exhibitors have, it's swag, right?
Yeah, like swagger dates back to, like, Shakespeare and beyond, um, and it
means, like, to sway. Um, but it was also a slang term in the 1800s for stolen
goods or loot. So, like, you're essentially literally looting all of the—all of the water
bottles and t-shirts and—and, uh, beer cozies. I think that's what's being evoked, isn't it?
'Cause I remember—I can picture images of, you know, burglars in stripy tops and—and masks with
a bag over their shoulder that says swag on it. Which is a terrible way to commit a
crime. Really blatant. My stolen stuff. Yeah, so I've always thought it was that.
I've always felt like, yeah, I was getting away with something. I think that's the vibe at
the—the best swag. And it's because it's the most expensive event in, at least, my sector, is always
at the Cannes Lions Festival in France every year. Oh, what, the Cannes?
Yeah, I—I literally—one of the pieces of swag that I have is a tattoo that
is on my leg that I got at the Pinterest booth, which is on the beach at Cannes.
A legit tattoo? Yeah, it's an actual tattoo that I got, that they
gave me for free at the Pinterest exhibitor booth at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
Just 'cause it's free doesn't mean you have to have it.
Well— They really got Pinterest written on your leg? No, it doesn't say Pinterest. It's a little
mountain range with a planet over it. Okay. Good to know. Good to [Music] know.
So, shall we get onto some legal jargon? Yeah, let's. Uh, give us a little
background on, uh, legal Latin. Yes, because it's—it's interesting that
there is so much Latin used in courts, particularly in the UK and—and in the United
States. And that's down to the fact that, for many hundreds of years in England, court
business was carried out in Latin. So there's a lot of that left over. But there's also the fact
that the practice of the Romans is, uh, revered to some extent. So some of these terms have, you
know, been deliberately pilfered from the Romans. Rather, Roman legal systems informed
modern European and Western legal systems. Yeah, exactly. So we have all of these terms that
people will have heard but not necessarily thought about precisely what they mean. Like ad hominem,
people would have heard, which means—well, it means literally to the person, but it's the
concept of, to use a sort of soccer metaphor, of playing the man, not the ball, right? It's
where you attack the individual advocating a position rather than the position itself.
That's—doing, attacking something ad hominem. You already mentioned bona fide, or bona feed.
Or you can also have mala fide, which mean, you know, in good faith or in bad faith.
So it's calling into question or affirming the motivations of the person that's speaking.
A really interesting one is this idea of habeas corpus, which comes up—which means you may have
the body, and it relates to everyone's right to not be improperly detained, you know, to be
detained without good reason. And the habeas corpus, to have the body, is basically referring
to the idea of the—the person having the right to appear in person before a court, before a judge,
to have the reasons for their detention explained. And that goes back many, many, many hundreds of
years. The right to habeas corpus—it's called the writ of habeas corpus—is what you submit. It
was enshrined in law in—in England in the 1600s, but it goes back even further than that.
Pro bono is another one that comes up in a lot of law drama. You know, the lawyer
says, I'm going to do this one pro bono because—I don't know—they've taken a shine
to the defendant for whatever reason. Sleeping with them or something.
That one's in the corporate world, too, these days. Uh, people who do,
like, pro bono work might do—like, if you're a marketing team or a creative team,
you might create a logo for a nonprofit pro bono. Oh, that's nice.
And it's short for pro bono publico, so for the public good.
A word that was originally legal Latin but now is almost entirely divorced from legal
Latin in common parlance is the word innuendo. Oh, really?
Yeah. So—so what does it mean?
It continues to be a legal term, often associated with, like, libel and slander
and defamation cases. It means a nod forward and refers to an argument that a given statement is
defamatory. The example that I came up with when talking about this earlier is, like, if you say,
A blue-haired action star embezzled $20 million, even if you didn't say the person's name, it
might be assumed to be you. You're nodding to the idea of that person, and by innuendo,
it defames you and damages your reputation. Now, it's sort of a—a nod
to something inappropriate. Now, um, so that's a whole—whole different thing.
Yeah, it means something slightly different, doesn't it, beyond the legal profession?
Yeah, it's—it's a double entendre. One of my favorite—or one of my favorite
moments from the TV show Scrubs is, um, one of the characters says to—I think his name
is Todd—Todd, you could turn anything into an innuendo. And he goes, In your end-o.
Yeah, was great, that one. Yeah, was great. I love that show.
Yeah, I think strictly it would be ungrammatical to have an innuendo, but we
do talk about, you know, make an innuendo. Yeah, really. You perform
innuendo, strictly, I think. Um, another one that has gained life outside
of the legal system, I think, is quid pro quo, right? Which just means something for
something. But that one's quite useful, I think. Yeah, quite a lot of these are, right? Ad
hoc. People talk about ad hoc. It means, like, to this, so, like, with respect to
something, right? So, ad hoc is for the purpose of, right? Isn't it? That's what it means.
This actually gets to, um, a recurring thing that happens in, like, legal—in legal contexts, um,
that requires word math that I've scared my TikTok followers with a little bit. Um, and it's this
formula that's used to create, like, pronomial adverbs like therein, hereabouts, and wherefore.
Um, and—and, like, basically, like, here, there, and where get turned into demonstrative pronouns
in these words, and then you attach a preposition to, like, say what the word does. So, like, there
plus a preposition gives you the meaning: the preposition plus that. So, therein means in that.
And the reason this shows up in legal contexts a lot is so you don't have to repeat things
that much. Um, so, the information therein, you can say over and over again rather than
saying the name of wherever therein is. Yeah, right. The information in the
thingy that we're talking about. Yeah, exactly. And—and that's what's behind
legal Latin: to be expeditious and precise as well. I mean, these terms are—are precise, and
that's why they—they keep coming up. I don't find them particularly irritating. I don't
think they're terribly inclusive, but a lot of the time they don't really need to be because
everyone that is involved knows what they mean. Absolutely. What I think is interesting too is the
way non-Latin terms, aside from, like, herein and therein and whatnot, end up in legal contexts too.
Because we—you know, because Latin and Roman legal systems were applied to, like, Germanic—originally
Germanic—cultures, um, sometimes we still get, like, hangers-on words. Like manslaughter, for
example, which is a confusing term legally, right? Yes, tell us.
In both, like, the UK and US legal systems, manslaughter is
classified as, like, a lesser degree of homicide, um, than murder, implying, like, a lack
of malice aforethought. In Middle English, it was pretty much interchangeable with
murder, but murder kind of always implied an elevated degree of malice. And it was the
implication that kind of let manslaughter be a, uh, a lower-tier word. And it is
odd that that one's kind of stuck around, but it is also, like, nearly identical to
the word homicide in structure and meaning. Yes. Yeah, man-kill. Not to be
confused with man's laughter. No. Yes. Ah, so good. So good.
Beyond legal Latin, you have the concept of legalese, right? Which isn't quite
the same thing necessarily. Legalese is—well, actually, in British English, this is what it
means. I don't know if it means the same in American English because I actually saw this term
labeled as British English when I had to look in the Collins Dictionary. Uh, but legalese is the
sort of impenetrable verbiage used in contracts, for example—in legal documents—rather
than in open court. Those, like, hereins and thereins and wherefores and such.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, impenetrable stuff. This is a rumor I saw running around on TikTok
not too long ago, probably about a year ago. Um, there were some folks saying that testifying
meant touching someone's testicles. Have you heard this one?
No. So, there's this theory that the words testify,
testimony, and testament refer to the historic practice of ball fondling while making oaths
and other promises. And even, like, people have written for Psychology Today that in ancient
Rome, two men taking an oath might, like, cup one another's testicles as a sign of truthfulness. Um,
and—and they're—on—in their defense, in, um, like, Jewish and Christian scholars have interpreted the
Genesis phrase put your hand under my thigh as, like, putting your hand under someone's body
to demonstrate, like, subservience. But all of this is a bit of a leap. It's a bit of a leap.
Generally speaking, it's, uh, it's considered to be groundless according to most etymology
sources. And even if it's not, it probably, like, doesn't have as much to do with the words
themselves. Like, we don't have any written or illustrated records of this happening
in Rome. And, like, given the frequency with which Romans put genitals in their artwork,
you'd think it would have come up here and there. I'm not having it. The New
Testament and the Old Testament: the new ball groping and the old ball groping.
It's—I mean, it's easy to see why the evidence has led speculative, curious people to believe
the theory. Because, like, the Latin word testis has two meanings: one of them is witness, and
one of them is testicle. And the idea here was probably that, like, you could tell the gender
of an infant by the fact that it had testicles. Like, that's the—okay, that's probably where
that comes from, and it has nothing to do, necessarily—you can, like, testify or
view or witness that fact in that way. Stranger things have been true.
Yep. [Music] Yep. I have a couple of words that were originally,
so to speak, legal terms but are now generally completely divorced from legal contexts. Or—I
mean, perhaps they are still used. There's going to be a lawyer in the comments that's
like, "This is—this is used every single day in my line of work." But, um, the way that
I typically consider the word paraphernalia, for example, has nothing to do with the law.
Oh, that's a fun word, isn't it? Paraphernalia, isn't it? It means, like, odds and ends,
of course. Um, but the literal meaning of the word paraphernalia, that para- and then
the phernalia on it, means beside the dowry. Oh, yes.
So, it's—it's the sort of additional accoutrements alongside the—the
things a woman brought with her to the marriage, outside of the dowry. So, um, the odds and
ends that are actually hers and not part of the business transaction between the families.
Because we love romance with a little business. That's excellent. I like that. That's really
good. Now I'm going to have that image when I hear the word paraphernalia. It's only going
to make that already enjoyable word even better. Another fun one, um, is the word mayhem.
Go on. In, uh, English and Anglo-French, mayhem was a
legal term for the act of injuring a person in order to make them less capable of defending
themselves. While in, uh, general usage, it referred to, like, any sort of, like,
intentional violence or damage. So, like, it was sort of concurrently a legal term and a
general term. But in a legal context, it was, like, basically fighting dirty.
It's quite an unusual word in the way it's structured. It doesn't look very
French. It doesn't look all that English, does it, either? May—may- to the word maim.
Um, and—and it's, like, etymologically kind of the same word. Um, and the original word
was, like, maimen, or something like that. Wow. Okay, yeah. No, I had no idea that
those started out as legal terms. Fantastic. I have one more, um, with a legal connection.
It's more legal-adjacent, um, but I would like to defend the use of the word legit.
You think it's legitimate? I think it's legit. Like, people will malign
this word as, like, a lazy, newfangled shortening of legitimate, but it's—it's
very oldfangled, as a matter of fact. Um, it dates back to the 1800s as an abbreviation of
legitimate in the legal phrase legitimate theater. So, in—in England, um, the 1737 Licensing
Act distinguished between legitimate theater and where it could be performed. Uh, high-end
theaters were licensed for legitimate theater, colloquially called legit drama, while others
were limited to supposedly lower forms like pantomime and melodrama.
I think that legit is legit. Sounds legit.
Sounds legit, mate. Sounds legit. It at least has a lot of tenure.
Tenure. And that—maybe that—maybe I'm getting a little too, um, educationally jargony here.
I was going to say, that sounded like jargon. We haven't even gone into linguistic jargon, but
I fear that we might unravel ourselves if we did. We might indeed.
We might indeed. Well, I've enjoyed this. No, I haven't enjoyed—no, I've not enjoyed all
of it. Some of it has made my skin crawl. But I've enjoyed discussing with you all of this
corporate jargon. And, uh, may every term that we have cited never pass our lips from here on in.
I would even go so far as to say that although some of these might be scalable, none of
them are Swiss Army knives that we need to keep in our linguistic toolkit. Unless we,
you know, are feeling a little unimaginative. Yeah, seeking a—a paradigm
shift or reinventing the wheel. Thanks for watching or listening to
another Words Unravelled. See you next time.