Modernreaders often wince at the flowery language of Jane Austen or Shakespeare, imagining their prose as the overgrown garden of English expression—ornate, indulgent, and in dire need of a trim. By contrast, today's language feels lean, efficient, even minimal. But this is a charming delusion. Austen may have taken a hundred words to describe a dinner party, but at least each word meant what it said. Shakespeare could pen a sonnet about love and still make more sense than most quarterly strategy memos. What has changed is not so much the length of our sentences but the weight of our words. Where once prose aimed to illuminate, modern managerial language too often aims to impress, seduce, or evade. Today, the inflation isn't ornamental—it's strategic. We have swapped the elegance of metaphor for the opacity of jargon and called it progress.
In an age when transformational is the adjective of choice for everything from coffee machines to calendar invites, the question must be asked—what's left for the truly radical? Semantic inflation, a term borrowed from the domain of philosophy and linguistics, refers to the diminishing value of words through their overuse or misuse. Like economic inflation that reduces the purchasing power of money, semantic inflation erodes the communicative power of language.
Examples of semantic inflation:
- Hero applied to anyone performing basic civic duties.
- Trauma used to describe routine stress.
- Innovative applied to ordinary or minor product updates.
- Literally used as a mere intensifier rather than its literal meaning.
Management communication has become ground zero for this linguistic drift. Executives no longer solve problems; they solution them. Teams don't meet challenges; they activate cross-functional paradigms. Organisations are no longer just busy; they are hyper-agile ecosystems of change readiness. Much like counterfeit currency, such language undermines trust and obfuscates intent.
Hype is not merely irritating managerial fluff. It is corrosive and organisationally dysfunctional. In its place, there is the opportunity to replace performance with sincerity and achieve clarity, restraint, and meaning.