What if – for the rest of the week – you didn’t say anything to your colleagues that you wouldn’t say to your friends? What if you had to explain your most complex projects and products and ideas in a way that a stranger at a cocktail party could both understand AND find interesting?

Would it be freeing? Or painful?

I think a lot of us would say the latter. Speaking plainly is quickly becoming one of the lost arts of communication. Shoved aside by management speak and corporate colloquialism. Exchanged for our very own secret decoder rings of tangled acronyms and mystery monikers. You know the big offenders:

Buzz words (and other office-ease): We touchbase, circle back and get face time about the big picture, benchmarking, deltas, and what’s on our collective plates so that we’re up to speed with our action items and time frames and can feel incented, leveraged and ready to operationalize (or maybe even spearhead!) the bleeding edge, synergized, high priority marketing initiative for Q1 11. I can practically feel the lethargy seeping out of every word.

Professional parlance (i.e. industry lingo): Perhaps the best example of this is from the very industry I market to. It’s the go-to emergency room diagnosis: lacerations and contusions. Meaning, of course, cuts and bruises. But, said in a way that’s infinitely more official and professional. Honestly, the only real reason to use words like those is to create space between the speaker and the listener by obfuscating the simple meaning with a mask of complexity (which, btw, is the same reason people like me use big unnecessary words like obfuscate) It’s a code, a right of passage. A merit badge in the meritocracy.

Acronyms (and abbreviations): I worked with our CD on a DTC POP and a JAMA ad to CCU HCPs that’s ETA was EOM but it needed DDMAC and MLR ok so we got on it ASAP. *enough said?* I’m all for skipping big ugly hairy words (I happily exchanged hyper text markup language for HTML, for example), but, I promise – there’s a limit to what acronymns can say.

So, I have this idea. This big crazy messy idea.

Let’s trade it in.

Let’s use communication to communicate. To trade ideas and information. Not to volley buzzwords.

Let’s take back the meaning of words and speak with creativity and passion. Not give up our intentions to a shorthand shortlist.

Let’s open it up and make it easy to collaborate and share. Not use words to build up walls and barriers.

Let’s talk.