Jump, pivot, circle back: Is this an office meeting or a basketball game?

“Ever noticed some people are always jumping?” asked Christine Cemm via email. “Jumping online. Jumping into a meeting. Jumping on Zoom. Jumping onto a highway to avoid heavy traffic. While my sister says she jumps in the shower before going out.”

Christine was onto something. Across media archives, more evidence springs into view. A business guru in The Australian Financial Review warns companies against “jumping into AI too quickly”, just as start-ups jump onto the sharemarket, or mineral giants jump the ROI (Return on Investment). Meanwhile, US tennis star Amanda Anisimova loves to “take an ice-bath before jumping onto court”.

Athletes are expected to be spry, of course, compared to investors jumping on the bandwagon, or job-hunters jumping onto Seek. If house prices and flu cases aren’t jumping, then Monash Uni is leapfrogging a dozen rival campuses on the best overall list.

The trend is exhausting, as Christine adds, “Does all this jumping demonstrate an enthusiasm or intent I lack?” Hardly. If anything, such active idiom is camouflage, a calisthenic dialect to lend a false brightness to the message’s duller truth. Tantamount to helplines telling you to hop online and pop in your details, implying a game of elastics rather than more red-tape bondage.

Business-speak adores such acrobatic claptrap. Track the use of “pivot” in recent years and you’ll imagine life is a game of basketball rather than a bottomless inbox. Just as Richard Harris and Craig Challen, the Thai cave rescuers of 2018, remain the only men qualified to mention deep-diving.

I call them playground verbs, a weaselly means of invoking purer games of yore, back when tag meant chasing mates and not chasing your arse for an e-Tag refund. Ironic, too, how the rise of zesty verbs contrasts with our growing torpor. A recent survey run (see, it’s impossible to avoid) by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare shows some 70 per cent of adults fail to meet physical activity guidelines. Just as the jump (damn) in screen-time among kids is soaring.

In other research, the more that managers misuse all these kiddie verbs, the more we hate them for it. Shane Littrell, a cognitive psychologist based at Cornell University, captures the mindset in his recent paper, The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes. Littrell isolates such loathed terms as swim-lanes, milestones, circling back and roadmaps as if office life is now a triathlon.

Speaking on National Public Radio, Littrell said that “people also use buzzwordy jargon-hea