Writing Blogger

Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal has a fascinating piece about how the term “bucket” has come to replace “silo” and “basket” as one of the business world’s most-used words, both with clients and customers and internally among employees and managers.

I’ve never really understood why, but I’ve always been fascinated by how terms like these get into the bloodstream of the business world and seem to permeate everything, becoming a catch-all word or phrase for virtually anything people want them to mean.

As the writer of the piece, Christopher Roads, explains:

The blossoming of bucket comes as no surprise to Anthony Aristar, a professor of linguistics at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. When words — particularly those centuries old — become popular in new and different ways, that often indicates a gap in modern language. In this case, business has become organized in so many different kinds of subdivisions that no one quite knows what to call them all.

The result: Old words like bucket are being revived in a “metaphoric extension.” Bucket, he explains, “still means a container for something, but now in a metaphorical context. You see this all the time with words.”

Back in the late 90s, when I worked as a technology consultant, “getting people out of their silos” to work with one another more creatively and more productively was the mantra then, along with chestnuts like “synergy,” “flat organizations” and others. (I’ll also never get through my head why the corporate world is in love with words like “utilize” over the clearer — and, ironically enough, more useful — “use.”)

I write this not just out of a pet peeve but also with the idea that business writing, above all, should be clear; as we all know well, it so often is painfully and obviously unclear. As Warren Buffett famously said once, “if I read an annual report and come across an accounting footnote I can’t understand, it’s not because the writer ran out of words in the dictionary to use. It’s because he didn’t want me to understand it.”

Good point, and well said. You can read the whole WSJ piece here (subscription required).