Happy Thought for 27 March 2026

 Have a Happy Thought:

Content warning: gratuitous use of what many consider a swear word.

 

We have all, on joining a new organisation or industry, had to learn a whole bunch of new words. Or potentially had to re-learn the meaning of a word in that new context.

This is often called “jargon” – being words that have a very specific meaning in a specific context.

There can however be words and phrases that more rightly can be termed “bullshit”.

And this is in the technical, jargon-y use of the word “bullshit”, as defined by philosopher Harry Frankfurt in 1986: basically, a complete disregard for whether the words being conveyed are true or false, so long as the bullshitter is convincing their listeners to go along with what the bullshitter wants.

Turns out that this is not confined merely to politics (let’s be honest, your brain had already gone there), this is a problem rampant in business culture.

So common, in fact, that a recent paper has developed a “Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale” to measure how susceptible workers are to the bullshit being spewed by corporate executives… and indeed by other workers. Basically, the researchers looked into how readily different individuals actually found meaning in the following phrases, which are, to any outsider, clearly bullshit:

·      Working at the intersection of cross-collateralization and blue-sky thinking, we will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing and end-state vision in a world defined by architecting to potentiate on a vertical landscape.

·      Our goal is to engage our capabilities by focusing our efforts on executing the current transmission of our empowerment, driving an innovative growth-mindset with our change drivers, and coaching energetic frameworks to our resonating focus.

·      Our bandwidth comes from the visionary culture-shifting of several new growth-based, integrated networks that capitalize on our heritage to engage our future when building bridges to success.

·      We will cover all the bases of our low hanging fruit by joining with our bleeding-edge, results-driven global partners to better growth hack our back-end architecture.

·      Our goal is to engage our conversations by focusing our efforts on architecting the current vector of our balanced scorecard.

·      As an emerging leader grounded in a mission to benchmark and nurture the human spirit, we have always aspired to make upstream connections, drilling down one more click on people and communities around the world.

·      Our success comes from the rigorous execution of several new strategic initiatives that capitalize on our heritage to drive our successful future.

Having read through those, you have earned yourself a cookie (or other treat of your choice).

(Is it bad that I’ve been in the corporate world for long enough that some of these actually made the tiniest bit of sense to me?!? 😱)

If you have ever written something like one of those, I think you deserve two cookies. 😬

 

There used to be a way to get your new-agey bullshit fix via the Deepak Chopra random word generator. It seems this no longer exists now that we have Large Language Models (“AI”) so easy to access. You can see some of its outputs here though: Deepak Chopra or Random Gibberish? Trick Question. – The Skeptical Libertarian

 

Thanks to Corey Doctorow for letting us know about this amazing study into corporate receptiveness for bullshit.