Banned words: a working list

Every trade has its dialect. Plumbers have one. Lawyers have a famous one. The agency world’s dialect is unusual because it was engineered, over decades of pitch meetings, to make small commitments sound enormous.

So we keep a list. Words that don’t get used here. Not because they’re incorrect. Because they’ve been asked to mean so many things that they no longer mean anything, and a word that can mean anything is a hiding place.

Some of these were decent words once. A few still hold honest jobs at other companies. Here, they’ve been retired and escorted from the building.

The current list, with charges attached.

• Synergy. No one has ever pointed at a real object and called it synergy. It exists only in slides, which tells you where it lives and what it eats.
• Leverage (as a verb). You leverage a rock with a stick. Everything else is “use,” dressed up for a board meeting.
• Disruptive. Toddlers are disruptive. Roadwork is disruptive. If the work had actually rearranged an industry, you wouldn’t need the adjective; the industry would be doing the talking.
• Game-changing. The game almost never changes. Most good work is playing the existing game with more skill than the other table.
• Best-in-class. Which class? Graded by whom? This one always arrives without its paperwork.
• Seamless. A wish, not a description. Every product with visible seams was called seamless by somebody during the week it shipped.
• Robust. Translation: we tested it once and it didn’t break.
• Elevate. In agency copy, brands get elevated the way suspects get detained. Vaguely, and nobody will say what happens next.
• Unlock. Your business is not a locked door, and a deck is not a key. If there’s value sitting somewhere, name it and go get it.
• Empower. Almost always means “we made a button.”
• Delve. Nobody delves. Notice how the word only appears in writing that no particular human seems to have written.
• Supercharge. Your marketing is not a carburetor.
• Solutions. We build websites, apps, brands, and campaigns. When you can name the thing, you should name the thing.
• Circle back. A promise to have this exact conversation again, with this exact result.
• Move the needle. Nobody who says this can tell you what the needle measures, where it started, or where it sits now. The needle appears only in sentences about moving it.
• Thought leader. The real ones never need the title, the same way tall people never mention their height.
• Cutting-edge. Applied with equal confidence to genuine research and to a slightly rounder button.
• Let’s dive in. It’s a paragraph, not a lake.
• At the end of the day. At the end of the day, it’s night.

The list grows a little every year, and we argue about candidates the way other offices argue about the thermostat. There’s a case pending against “holistic.” “Ecosystem” survives on a technicality, because occasionally things really are one.

Here’s why we bother, beyond the sport of it.

Jargon isn’t a style problem. It’s a commitment problem.

Put “synergy” in a proposal and nothing has been promised, so nothing can fail. Write “we’ll rebuild your checkout so it stops losing people at the shipping step” and now there’s a thing in the world that either happens or doesn’t. Vague language is safe. Specific language has consequences, which is exactly why the vague kind is so popular and exactly why we won’t use it.

We prefer consequences, so we just say what we’ll build. Then we build it.