2044: No, Thank You

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “No, Thank You.”

“If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?”

I’m going to cheat a little here and not talk about a specific word, but more a general style of communication. There are numerous words that could be used to represent this style of communication, but not one that particularly stands out more than others, so I’m going to talk in more general terms.

As most of you know, the rise of the Internet over the course of the last few decades has made it easier than ever for people to communicate with one another. And with that ease of communication has come a relaxation of the rules of formality when communicating. In some ways, this is a bit of a shame, because the distinction between formal and informal use of language can often send implicit signals to the people in an interaction as to what is and is not appropriate to talk about. But in others, I’m actually very much relieved about this, because formal language is so mind-numbingly impersonal it’s borderline offensive to be confronted with.

I’m thinking particularly in terms of “professional” email messages here, and I’ll give you an example of the distinction. I’ve been doing some freelance work for a company for a while. When I started, the company was very much in its infancy, with relatively few employees and a single point of contact for the work I was doing. Said point of contact was a delightful young woman who was always chatty, helpful and charming whenever we spoke to one another. It was a pleasure to interact with her, even though for the most part we were only ever exchanging standard pleasantries and details of work assignments. But just little things like her squealing enthusiasm for me when I told her I was getting married, or chats about the extremes of weather we’ve seen this summer — all of those things were nice, and gave me a feeling of being “connected” to her and, by extension, a feeling of “belonging” to the company as a whole, despite simply being an outside contractor.

A few weeks ago, my former contact was replaced as she (presumably) moved on to other duties in the company as it has started to grow. She’s still with the company and tends to get copied in on email messages, but I haven’t heard a peep out of her since. Her replacements are like robots. And I mean that pretty much literally — every message I get from them absolutely stinks of copy-and-paste, email-by-template communication… largely because they clearly are copy-and-paste emails-by-template, and it’s easy to tell this due to the fact that there are the exact same words in each one.

There’s a good reason for this sort of thing, of course; as companies grow and have to communicate and collaborate with more and more people, it’s not considered to be particularly efficient to manually type out each and every message. So in come the templates, the form letters, the copy-and-paste boilerplate text.

Efficient it may be, but that feeling of “connection” is gone as a result. I don’t know these people, and even having sent messages to them in the same tone as I spoke with my previous contact, they’ve made no effort to engage with me in any way; I may as well be downloading assignments from an automated message board.

This is frustrating enough by itself, but combine it with the passive-aggressive tone that business communications tend to take — all “gentle reminders” and “looking forward” to something you haven’t done yet — and it’s not something that I feel is particularly conducive to a good working relationship.

It doesn’t really bother me all that much, to be honest; the company in question is a means to an end (said end being “getting money”) for me right now, and ultimately a personal connection with it isn’t all that important to me. I just find it a little sad that what was once friendly, personal interactions between two people now feels like sending commands and requests to an automated system. You’re human beings; act like it!

So, to (sort of) answer the original question, then: I would ban business-speak, form letters and email templates from general usage and insist that everyone communicate with everyone else as an individual. It would help make the world just a little bit friendlier as a result, and I feel that would work wonders for making people feel more positive about all sorts of things.