Shaking my ashen spear (again)

This is another post about not using jargon. I blame the sheer number of times I hear people use “solution” as a verb. How did we get here? How is it that we are here in 2023, solutioning for problems?

Let’s go back 1300 years or so, to Anglo-Saxon Britain, where my grubby ancestors were hanging out in long houses, fishing and hunting and cavorting about. They were speaking what we now call Old English, a language I studied in graduate school mistakenly thinking it would be easier than picking up French classes again. I thought it would be “ye olde shoppe,” y’all. Spoiler alert: it is a foreign language (see Beowulf in Old English). Although my foray into Old English was much more of a challenge than I expected, it ended up being a wonderful thing to learn about.

As the root of the English language, Old English is a beautiful, vigorous base on which to build. It’s strong and hardy and focused on subjects, verbs, and the objects of those verbs. It’s a language of doing, a language of action. The tales are focused on people fighting monsters, winning battles, and rewarding loyal friends. While I love the additional adjectives, adverbs, and other great things brought by the Normans and our encounters with other languages, there’s something crisp and direct about Old English.

Beowulf, the hero who rips off monster arms and kills dragons, would not solution for problems. In the poem that bears his name, he shakes his spear, he defends his hall, he dives into the lake pursuing the monster, etc., etc. Clearly, I’m joking a bit here, but there is a case to be made for the active voice and for strong verbs (or at the very least, verbs that are verbs and not nouns). We may not be fighting monsters in our present-day work, but we are doing work that’s worth doing, right? It’s worth describing in a way that involves people’s minds and spirits somehow.

I honestly do think it makes a difference when we describe what we do in words that make sense, in regular, vigorous language (whatever language it is that you speak), and not jargon. The language you speak is the language of stories, the language of life. Jargon is not the language of anything interesting or lively. Jargon shakes no spears. Jargon slays no monsters.