The lead came feels cold against my palm, a dull gray weight that demands 12 pounds of pressure to bend correctly. I am currently tilting a piece of 14th-century cobalt glass, observing how the light catches the microscopic pits in its surface. My phone, resting on the workbench, vibrates with a notification from a meeting I am supposedly attending via a speakerphone 22 feet away. A voice, filtered through digital compression, is currently explaining that we need to ‘leverage our core competencies to bridge the gap in our go-forward strategy.’ I stop. I pick up my phone. I begin to clean the screen with a microfiber cloth, obsessed with a single smudge near the top left corner. I rub it until the glass is perfectly sterile, perfectly clear, while the voice in the background continues to pile clouds of verbal vapor into the room.

The Honesty of Shattering

I’ve spent 32 years as a stained glass conservator. In my world, if you aren’t precise, things shatter. You cannot ‘synergize’ a cracked lancet window. You cannot ‘circle back’ to a solder joint that has already cooled and crystallized. You either fix the structural integrity of the window, or the window falls out of the stone casing and breaks into 122 pieces on the cathedral floor. There is an honesty in physical materials that corporate language seems desperate to avoid. We use jargon because clarity is terrifying. Clarity implies a deadline. Clarity implies a name attached to a task. Clarity implies that if the ‘value proposition‘ doesn’t manifest, someone is actually at fault.

The Silo of Dissent

Consider the phrase ‘taking it offline.’ On the surface, it sounds like a practical way to save time in a meeting. In reality, it is a defensive maneuver used to sequester dissent. When a difficult question is asked-perhaps a question about why the budget has ballooned by 52 percent-the response to ‘take it offline’ is an act of burial. It moves the conflict away from the eyes of the 12 other people in the room and into a private silo where it can be quietly strangled. It is a way of saying, ‘Your observation is inconvenient to the narrative I am currently constructing.’

We have created a dialect where ‘reaching out’ replaces ‘calling,’ where ‘bandwidth’ replaces ‘time,’ and where ‘impactful’ replaces ‘good.’ These are not just synonyms. They are filters. They are designed to strip the human element out of the work. If I tell you I don’t have the ‘bandwidth’ to help you, I am blaming a systemic resource constraint. If I tell you I don’t have the ‘time,’ I am making a personal choice about my priorities. Jargon allows us to pretend that our choices are actually just the result of external ‘ecosystems.’

The Secular Priesthood

I remember a project 2 years ago where a client asked me to ‘reimagine the legacy aesthetic‘ of a set of windows. I asked if they wanted me to clean them or replace them. They repeated the phrase: ‘reimagine the legacy aesthetic.’ We went back and forth for 42 minutes before I realized they wanted me to make the windows look older than they actually were by applying a faux-patina. They couldn’t just say ‘make them look old.’ That would sound too simple, too mundane. It wouldn’t justify the 222-page report they had commissioned. They needed the language to be as complex as the invoice.

This complexity is a form of gatekeeping. By using terms like ‘omni-channel’ or ‘disruptive innovation,’ we create an in-group and an out-group. If you don’t know the vocabulary, you aren’t part of the ‘vision.’ It’s a secular priesthood. But the irony is that even the people inside the priesthood don’t really know what the words mean. I have sat in rooms where 12 people nodded in agreement to a ‘go-to-market pivot’ only to find out later that 12 different people had 12 different ideas of what we were actually doing. We are nodding at the sound of the words, not the meaning.

Weight, Sharpness, Reality

I put the microfiber cloth down. The phone is still vibrating. I imagine the person on the other end of the line. Are they also cleaning their screen? Are they looking out a window, wondering when the ‘alignment’ will finally end so they can go do some actual work? We have become so addicted to the ‘narrative’ that we have forgotten the ‘object.’ In my case, the object is glass. It is silica and potash and metallic oxides. It is heavy. It is sharp. It is real.

We need to start treating our words like the materials in my studio. We need to weigh them. We need to check them for impurities. We need to ask: Does this word actually support the weight of the idea, or is it just filler? If we replaced every instance of ‘utilize’ with ‘use,’ and every ‘incentivize’ with ‘encourage,’ would our businesses collapse? Or would we suddenly find ourselves forced to confront the reality of what we are actually doing?

The Armor of Insecurity

I’ve noticed that the more confident a person is in their expertise, the simpler their language becomes. A master carpenter doesn’t talk about ‘leveraging the structural properties of oak.’ They talk about the grain. A master chemist doesn’t ‘optimize molecular interactions.’ They talk about the reaction. It is only the insecure, the middle-managers of the soul, who need the armor of jargon to protect themselves from the possibility of being understood. Being understood is dangerous because it leads to being held accountable.

I pick up the glass cutter. I make a single, decisive score across the cobalt surface. It makes a crisp, high-pitched sound-the sound of 102 years of tradition meeting a diamond tip. There is no jargon for this. There is only the cut. You either get it right, or you waste the material. I wish our meetings had that kind of consequence. I wish every time someone used the word ‘holistic,’ a small piece of glass would shatter in the corner of the room. Perhaps then we would learn the value of silence, or at the very least, the value of the truth.

The meeting on the phone finally ends. The last thing I hear is the facilitator saying they will ‘loop back with the stakeholders to ensure we’re all singing from the same songbook.’ I hang up. I look at the cobalt glass. I look at my clean, empty screen. There is no songbook. There are only 2 people on that call who know what needs to happen next, and neither of them was the one speaking.

I think about Phoenix J. and the dust. I think about the 12 grams of solder I’m about to melt. I think about the fact that tomorrow, I will have to explain to the client that the ‘integrated solution’ they bought is actually just a very expensive way of saying they need to fix their roof. I will use the word ‘roof.’ I will use the word ‘leak.’ I will use the word ‘hole.’ It will be uncomfortable. They will probably try to ‘circle back’ to a more pleasant vocabulary. But the water doesn’t care about the vocabulary. The water only knows the hole. And my job, as a person who works with real things, is to point at the hole until it is fixed.