A friend texted me last week to say she’d been “out of pocket” all day and could we reschedule our plans. I knew what she meant, obviously. But I also found myself wondering, as I do every time someone uses that phrase, what the original image was supposed to be. Out of pocket. Like money that got spent somewhere it wasn’t supposed to. It doesn’t describe unavailability at all, and yet here it is, doing the work of “unavailable” inside a thousand Slack channels right now.
I work at a small capital management firm, where the team is small enough that nobody really talks like this. We say what we mean with reasonable directness. But most of my friends who work at large financial services companies, consulting firms, or tech companies, have adopted a whole second vocabulary that they now deploy fluently even in casual conversation, even in texts to me at 8pm on a Thursday. Ping me. Let’s align. I’ll be out of pocket. Lots of moving parts. That’s on my radar. Taking this offline.
I’m not writing this as a complaint, exactly. I’m writing it because the spread of this language into every corner of professional life seems worth actually looking at, and the usual takes on corporate jargon don’t quite get at what’s interesting about it.
The usual take is that it’s needlessly obscure, that plain English would do the job better, that you should say “email me” instead of “ping me” and “unavailable” instead of “out of pocket.” This is correct but it’s also a little beside the point. Most corporate jargon isn’t actually obscure in practice. Everyone inside the organization knows what “ping me” means. The vocabulary is shared. So the problem isn’t that it fails to communicate information. The problem is something else.
Corporate jargon exists at the intersection of two forces: the need to signal belonging, and the need to signal activity. Both are structurally incentivized in large organizations, and jargon serves both simultaneously, which is why it spreads so efficiently.
The belonging function is pretty legible. When you say “lots of moving parts” in a meeting, you’re not primarily describing your project. You’re demonstrating that you know the register. You’re fluent. You’ve been here long enough to absorb the vocabulary without trying. Jargon is essentially a shibboleth: using it correctly signals membership, and membership matters in large organizations where you can’t actually know everyone and have to rely on proxies.
The activity function is a little darker, and I think it’s the more interesting one. When you say “there’s a lot of bandwidth on this right now” or “we’re looped in on all the moving parts” or “I want to make sure we’re aligned before we socialize this more broadly,” you’re doing something peculiar: you’re describing the process of work rather than the work itself. The language is all about alignment, looping in, socialization, bandwidth, radar. It describes a state of coordination rather than a state of output. And this, I think, is what makes it so useful in organizations where the work is genuinely hard to see.
In a large company, especially in a knowledge-work context, individual output is often illegible to the people above you. What’s legible is participation: are you in the meetings, on the threads, looped in, aligned? Jargon is the linguistic form of that participation. It doesn’t describe what you made or decided; it describes that you were present and engaged and moving.
I find this genuinely fascinating rather than just annoying, because it means the language is doing something real. It’s not a failure of communication. It’s a successful adaptation to an environment where the currency is coordination rather than output, and where looking busy is structurally rewarded in ways that are sometimes indistinguishable from being busy.
But I want to slow down here, because this is where the critique gets harder. The fact that jargon is a rational adaptation to a particular environment doesn’t mean it’s harmless. I think it has a cost that compounds quietly over time, and the cost isn’t just to clarity.
The cost is to your own thinking. When you start describing your work primarily in terms of coordination and process rather than substance and output, you can, gradually, stop noticing the difference. Not because you’re dishonest but because language shapes thought in ways we don’t always catch. If I tell my manager I’m “looping in stakeholders to align on the path forward,” I’m giving myself a story about what I’m doing that feels productive and substantive. But I haven’t named what I’m actually deciding, what the stakes are, or what I think is right. The jargon has let me off the hook of having to think that part through.
I’m not making a claim that everyone who says “ping me” has stopped thinking. That would be both unfair and silly. But I do think the cumulative effect of a vocabulary organized around process rather than substance is that it becomes harder to reach for the more direct, more exposed question: what is this actually for, and do I think it’s right?
For people just entering large organizations, this is worth keeping track of. Not as a reason to refuse the vocabulary, because you do need to function inside the place you work, and refusing the shared language of a professional environment is its own kind of posturing. But rather as a reason to maintain a second channel alongside it: the private one where you’re actually thinking about what you’re doing and why, in plain language, with some care.
That same friend is back in pocket now, by the way. We did eventually reschedule our plans. She spent most of it telling me about a project at work that she’s genuinely skeptical of, and she did it in clear, direct sentences, the way she’s always talked to me. The corporate vocabulary didn’t follow her out of the office. I think that’s the right instinct, even if it’s one most people arrive at by accident rather than on purpose.