When buzzwords aren't useful they're not real. Take German philosopher Martin Heidegger's word for it.
“If you can’t explain it in a simple way, you haven’t understood it,” said my philosophy professor. It was a Monday night. Twenty or so people were crammed together in a small conference room at the University of Bergen, Norway. The ventilation system assumed no one did, and shut down. For three hours we would practically be holding our breath while going through another chapter of Heidegger’s infamous book “Being and Time”. You may not know it, but for many, this was the founding brick ehm...book that started the philosophical discipline of existentialism. The philosopher Jean Paul Sartre read this while being a prisoner of war. Others have used it to get a good night's sleep.
I was an undergraduate student and wanted a shortcut to wisdom. The title was promising: «Being and time». Why not tackle the big questions in life head on? So what if it did take the long route through Monday nights for a year.
Philosophers eat B2B buzzwords for breakfast.
What it really meant was following Martin Heidegger’s own search for what it is to say that something exists. Not why some being exists, but being itself. You follow? It’s the kind of sentence that would suck the air out of any room. Of course he had already checked if the ancient Greeks had a good word for it. They didn’t. There was always some even more ancient Greek dodging the question. All of them defining individual existing things.
To make it “easy”, Heidegger started off like many innovative people do - defining brand new term and words. Highly specialized buzzwords. A couple of hundred pages of them. Just “the basics” without which the rest of the book would remain a mystery.
McGyver would never use words that buzz.
One small part of Heidegger's solution was to remove things (nouns) from every sentence and replace them with verbs. Turning things into actions. And sentences into what felt like tongue twisters. After all what makes a hammer, a hammer? Is it the hammer shape or what you use it for? What makes anything something at all, is the relationship between you and what you use it for. Maybe even being itself. I don’t know. Reading it was like reading english as algebra. Not a single sentence could be understood by simply reading it. Every concept was a new term. A new buzzword. This is what philosophers do. Reinvent language to find or define meaning. It is their bread and butter. Should companies do the same?
Nobody ever heard MacGyver quarrel over what to call the thing he used to save the day. It went BOOM! and got him the recognition through a problem solved.
Specialized words separates us from them.
Back in our conference room, it was like we had spent a year religiously reading a bible for people who believed God was long dead. The faculty staff were locked in a struggle over who had grasped its true meaning. Who had truly understood this ungraspable book? Fractions were formed, heretics unlikely to get tenure. As we speak papers are being written about what Martin Heidegger meant. Interpreting all the masters looking for new meaning, is a large part of what drives the humanities department at universities. Their business is buzzwords, because their business is about interpreting words. Most people however, can remember more names of philosophers than what they actually said. Even if it promises to teach you something profound about existence or life itself.
What does it say about generating new words or using specialized terms to make people understand what you do?
What buzzwords can't do for B2B
New words only matters if you get someone else to use them, and they only will if it is truly useful to them. Just think about the words you yourself have picked up the last decade. You won’t spend two seconds collecting words that don’t make sense to what you want to achieve. What you are actually using them for.
Meanwhile the amount of incomprehensible buzzwords generated by those who want to stand out from the crowd has exploded. Trying to be be recognized as competent within their field, companies have paradoxically created a way of excluding the crowd. Why the paradox? If you need marketing, you want the crowd. It's tempting to quote the professors unfair and harsh definition of done for homework:
“if you can’t say it in a simple way, you haven’t understood it.”
The rest is just vanity. If you are useful, people will remember your name regardless. It's the way your potential clients talk that matters.
