The Rise of ‘Elite Speak’: Why Do Smart People Sound So Dumb?

The realization that a large number of well-educated, well-meaning Bostonians had lost the ability to talk like regular people crystallized for me recently, after I happened to visit three prestigious Boston places—or, as we now call them, “spaces.”

Let me give you some visibility into my particular lived experience.

Space number one was the Boston Foundation. Now, before we go further, let me say that I’m an unabashed fan of the foundation, which I see as a civic gem. Its intentions are noble. Its research about Boston is first-rate. Its lectures are timely and interesting. In fact, the event I attended one recent morning was great, content-wise. What distracted me—okay, at some point, I went beyond distracted to irked, possibly even perturbed—was the academic-y language the speakers (whose names I’ll leave out) kept lapsing into. Within two minutes, someone referred to “communities that are historically marginalized,” followed quickly by “intersectional”—at which point, to use a phrase uttered by none of the speakers—we were off to the races. Over the next hour, every time a participant used one of these fancy, occasionally impenetrable terms, I decided to write it in my notebook, drinking-game style. By the time things wrapped up, my list included “toxic,” “problematic,” “proactive,” “health equity agenda,” “stakeholders,” “signaling,” “coded,” “interventions,” “outcomes,” “operationalize,” “disaggregate” (two times), “the work” (three times), and “incubated” (only once, but not in relation to chickens).

In fairness, one person did give a “shout-out” to another person, which, when I wrote it in my notebook next to “permission space,” made me giggle a little, just because of the dichotomy.

Space number two: the well-regarded Boston University School of Social Work. I had a few minutes on my hands on the day I was there, and so, as I wandered the corridors, I started looking at the signs and posters hung on the bulletin boards. Many of them were filled with the same types of terms I’d heard at the Boston Foundation—language that once lived only within the walls of sociology departments but these days shows up with regularity in my social media feed: “decolonized,” “systemic,” “student affinity spaces,” “people-powered,” “participatory democracy,” “policy advocacy,” “root causes,” “minoritized adults,” “strategic imperatives.” As I was leaving, I noticed an academic paper someone had posted. Perhaps you’ve read it? It’s about “culturally adapted stigma mitigation intervention (CASMI), based on culturally adapted motivational interviewing.”

Finally, lest you think I only hang out in lefty places, space number three was the Harvard Business School, where I arrived one evening for a full-on celebration of capitalism: a Shark Tank–style new business competition. The B-school folks spoke in a slightly different dialect than their social-sciences counterparts, but it was equally contorted. In just the first 30 minutes of presentations, I heard “raise” used as a noun and “bucket” used as a verb, not to mention “entrepreneurial ecosystem,” “facilitating the network,” “activate ideas,” “go-to-market strategy,” “10X,” “20X,” “innovation pipeline,” “transparency,” “building community,” and “strong velocity.”

That night, I tossed and turned in bed, thinking about all the terms I’d heard. I finally operationalized a new strategy—quantifying sheep—and drifted off to sleep.

The places—sorry, spaces!—I just mentioned are, of course, hardly the only ones in Boston where you’ll hear what I’ve come to think of as Elite Speak, a fascinating, frequently mind-melting mash-up of business buzzwords, social justice terminology, and therapy lingo that has, over the past decade or so, become the lingua franca of Boston’s professional class. It’s talk you’ll hear in coffee shops in the Back Bay and at dinner parties in Newton, in startup strategy sessions in Kendall Square and at nonprofit board meetings in Cambridge, on trying-very-hard corporate websites and trying-even-harder LinkedIn profiles. While the use of this language certainly isn’t a Boston-only phenomenon, the fact that highly educated professionals and knowledge-industry workers are (to borrow an Elite Speak term) overrepresented here makes this a very local phenomenon nonetheless—a new version, almost, of the Boston accent. Goodbye: You can’t pahk yah cah in Hahvud Yahd. Hello: I stand with those in my community doing the work of preserving Harvard Yard as a pedestrian-only space.

Is this phenomenon, to borrow another phrase, problematic? I’d argue that it is. For starters, if your politics lean left (or, like mine, center-left), it’s fair to say this manner of speaking is in part responsible for our current MAGA-inspired misery. A few years ago, political consultant James Carville was the first person I saw complain that too many Democrats spoke like they were hanging out, as he put it, in the faculty lounge. “I don’t know anyone who lives in a ‘community of color,’” Carville noted. “I know lots of white and Black and brown people, and they all live in…neighborhoods.”

Carville was onto something, as I think the recent presidential election showed. And the Trump team has wasted no time essentially jamming some of this language down liberals’ throats, not only dismantling DEI programs but also removing many of the terms Carville was talking about from federal government websites. (That plans for the purge included deleting a photo of the Enola Gay—the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb—tells you all you need to know about their level of vitriol. And competence.)

The problems I’m talking about, though, go deeper than politics. Elite Speak fails as basic communication. That word comes from the Latin communicatus, which means “to make common.” But the way the professional class now talks—whether it’s in business, in politics, or answering the question “How are you?”—aims to do the opposite. It’s the linguistic equivalent of a gated community.

To a large extent, Elite Speak mirrors the environments that shape the professional class—from prestigious universities and Fortune 500 offices to tech startups and therapy couches. “This is, quite frankly, just the way I talk,” Stephanie Roulic, founder of the organization Startup Boston, says one day as we discuss the very specific lingo of her world. “This is the vernacular I’m used to. This is every-single-day life for me.”

Not long ago, Roulic, who’s in her mid-thirties, put together a glossary of those terms—from “runway” and “churn rate” to “seed stage” and “product-market fit”—for Startup Boston’s website. She did it, she tells me, not only for newbies who can be overwhelmed by Startup Speak but also for startup vets who don’t always see eye to eye on the meaning of specific terms. (Talmudic scholars have apparently long debated the difference between an “adviser” and a “mentor,” an “incubator” and a “venture studio.”)

I ask Roulic if she ever confounds people when she uses startup language outside of the, uh, entrepreneurial ecosystem. She laughs. “I can lose people,” she admits. “Now I just avoid telling those stories. Or I give a very watered-down version of my world to my loved ones.” One exception is her mom, who works in finance. “She completely understands burn rate. So we’re good.”

Roulic is certainly not the only professional who’s been confronted with a communication gap. One person I spoke with for this piece—they asked not to be named out of fear of offending much of the Boston business community—confided, “Sometimes people in business can string all these different words together, and I initially think, ‘Wow, they really sound smart.’ But then I realize I didn’t understand anything they said. I’ve started asking people, ‘Can you explain that?’”

What we’re dealing with here—whether it’s “safe space” or “permission space,” “BIPOC” or “A round funding,” “core competencies” or “value add”—falls into the category of jargon, which the Cambridge Dictionary defines as “special words or expressions that are used by particular professions or groups and are difficult for others to understand.” Which, at least to me, immediately raises the question: Why are these groups talking to one another in a way that shuts out everybody else?

Well, at least some Elite Speak began its life as technical language—terms that had very specific meanings for practitioners inside a particular world. Take, perhaps, the biggest professional-class buzzword of the past two decades: “disruption.” Its roots go back to the mid-1990s, when Harvard Business School professors Clayton Christensen and Joseph Bower wrote an article for Harvard Business Review titled “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave” that attempted to explain why leading companies often failed to stay on top when technology changed. But the authors didn’t use “disruptive” to mean just any kind of breakthrough technology. They meant something more precise: an innovation that made a product or service more accessible and affordable and, therefore, transformed an industry from the bottom of the market up. Alas, as the term caught on wildly in business circles over the next few years, the precision of its meaning disappeared, leaving “disrupt” to now basically mean “change.” (I once read a hilarious magazine article about a company that wanted to “disrupt” the world of laundry.) The loss of nuance was apparently deeply frustrating to Christensen, who passed away in 2020. To this day, the website of his namesake think tank calls innovative disruption “one of the most misunderstood and misapplied terms in the business lexicon.”

Christensen might have taken solace in the fact that the same fate has befallen other technical terms in other fields as they’ve caught on with the professional class. For instance, in psychology, the clinical definition of “trauma” is “any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect.” The definition goes on to list rape, war, and earthquakes as potential examples of traumatic events, but in our popular usage, you can now have “trauma” from standing in line for 10 extra minutes at Whole Foods.

“Equity” is another casualty. In the world of sociology, the word refers to fairness and justice—specifically to the idea that not everyone starts in the same place, which should be acknowledged and dealt with. But in our current world, equity is sometimes used interchangeably with “equality”—which is flat-out wrong—or to just broadly suggest, you know, race stuff.

Not all Elite Speak is a bastardization of technical language. In other cases, it reflects the communication quirks of a particular field—especially leaders within those fields. Maybe because CEOs are big on action, the business world has a long-standing habit of turning nouns into verbs (a phenomenon known, fittingly, as “verbing”). That means you “calendar” a meeting; “table” an idea; “task” a person with, um, a task. For whatever reason, business folks also love themselves a metaphor, which is why you might be asked to do a deep dive and go after low-hanging fruit so we can move the needle. But hey, don’t boil the ocean.

If businesspeople have a touch of the poet in them, no one has ever said such a thing about academics, who gravitate toward jargon that’s complex and opaque. A decade ago, noted Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Why Academics Stink at Writing.” Pinker offered a few theories. One was “the curse of knowledge”—professors simply couldn’t imagine their readers weren’t as learned as they were, so they didn’t even try to present their ideas clearly. Pinker also explained that academics write in a “self-conscious style”—which meant, in essence, that no academic wants to be the academic who doesn’t sound like an academic.

I couldn’t help but think of Pinker as I looked at the website of another prestigious Boston-based school of social work, the one at Boston College. Prominent on the site is a quote from the school’s dean, Gautam Yadama: “Engaging in place-based work and transcending disciplines to tackle complex social problems amplifies and strengthens the contributions of the School of Social Work. When we are in partnership with communities and scholars from across our universities, our work not only has translational impact, but solutions to the world’s most complex problems are within closer reach.”

I emailed Professor Yadama—a respected scholar who, quite admirably, has focused much of his career on poverty—a couple of times to see if I could interview him about academic language, but I never got a reply.

As a result, I was not able to calendar time with him, and we will, regrettably, not be in partnership on this article.

Illustration by Dale Stephanos

Given the wonkiness and weirdness of so much jargon, why has it become so common? Why are so many of us scrambling to pepper it into our conversations?

One reason is the eighth grader who lurks inside us, desperate to be included in the cool kids’ group text. “People use these words to identify with the ‘in’ group,” says Adam Aleksic, a Harvard-educated linguist who writes the entertaining “Etymology Nerd” Substack and has a new book, Algospeak, coming out this summer. Now, your “in” group of choice might be different from mine, but we all use verbal shorthand to show we belong. “If someone is using language that says they have progressive tendencies,” Aleksic explains—ableism here, restorative justice there—“it can actually be a signal to other people they’re in the ‘in’ group.”

But being in the group is only the first step. In 2020, organizational behavior professor Zachariah Brown was the lead author of a journal article that offered an intriguing hypothesis: People who are “low status” in a group go heavy on jargon in order to elevate their status. Brown and company—who by “low status” basically meant pecking order, not anything to do with socioeconomics—tested their hypothesis in nine different ways. For instance, they looked at the titles of hundreds of Ph.D. dissertations and master’s theses and found that students from lower-status schools—those with lesser rankings from U.S. News & World Report—used more jargon than students from schools with higher rankings. In another test, the authors asked MBA students which new business description was better.

One description said: “We plan to take advantage of the anticipated changes in the retail furniture industry and become one of the first companies to bypass existing physical retail channels by selling directly to customers online.”

The other said: “We plan to leverage the anticipated disruption in the retail furniture industry space and obtain a first mover advantage by disintermediating existing physical retail channels and selling directly to customers online.”

You guessed it: Students who perceived themselves to be “lower status”—i.e., they were told their colleagues were older and had more business experience—were significantly more likely to choose the “disintermediating” description than higher-status students were.

When we talk via Zoom one day, I ask Brown—who tells me he studies “showing off” for a living—what’s going on here. He says it’s really no different from renting a Ferrari for your high school reunion if you’re feeling a little insecure about how things have panned out for you. “When the threat is on,” Brown says, “the feathers come out.”

Aleksic says much of the same thing. Status, he explains, is why, in recent years, the professional class has medicalized so many ordinary struggles. “People feel like it legitimizes their perspectives,” he says. “They have ‘trauma’ or ‘anxiety,’ even though those are medical terms.”

Aleksic and Brown were both talking about scenarios in which people try to raise their status with jargon. It strikes me there’s another type of jargon that’s used in order to avoid losing status. For decades (if not longer), terms that were acceptable in one generation (say, “retarded”) have become unacceptable in the next. It’s not just that words fall out of style; they have a moral judgment attached to them. Use the wrong term, and you risk being scolded, if not shunned.

A recent example is person-first language, which posits that we shouldn’t reduce people to a particular disability they might have but instead put the person before the condition. Bad: “the blind.” Good: “a person with a visual impairment.” Bad: “He’s emotionally disturbed.” Good: “He has a mental health diagnosis.”

Of course, we all know in practice this can get tricky. Not only can the language become cumbersome, but some people with disabilities have argued their conditions are actually an inherent part of their identities. In which case, “person with autism” is bad, and “autistic person” is good.

Then there’s the issue of whether all of this sensitivity sucks energy from bigger fights.

Over the past 20 years, during which time we’ve moved from “the homeless” to “people experiencing homelessness” to “people who are unhoused,” the number of our fellow citizens who have no place to live has reached a record high. If you’re living on the street, do you care so much what you’re called?

Then again, maybe I’m missing the point. As Brown sums things up for me: Sometimes, we use jargon not to say something about a subject but to say something about ourselves. “Take Latinx,” he offers. “From the audience’s perspective, you’ve lost information about gender. But you’ve gained a tremendous amount of information about the political leanings of the person who just used the term.

“It’s the same with business jargon,” he continues. “I don’t ‘use,’ I ‘leverage.’ Or I’m ‘a utilizer.’” Maybe one who’s driving a Ferrari.

As the watering down of concepts like “disruption,” “trauma,” and “equity” show, it’s not clear we even know what the hell we’re saying when we drop a bunch of trendy terms on people.

So here’s the most important question of all: Is there anything wrong with this? After all, projecting status is something we do all day long. The clothes we wear. The cars we drive. The schools we choose. Earlier in this article, I shared that my politics are center-left. What was that but me trying to suck up to the “in” group I’m trying to be part of?

And yet, I’d say there are reasons the professional class should be wary of our linguistic peacocking. As the watering down of concepts like “disruption,” “trauma,” and “equity” show, it’s not clear we even know what the hell we’re saying when we drop a bunch of trendy terms on people. Even worse, I can’t help wondering if we hide behind Elite Speak in order to avoid saying anything of substance at all.

One morning in March, I amused myself by visiting the websites of a handful of Boston’s largest and highest-profile companies, from Fidelity, State Street, and Liberty Mutual to DraftKings, CarGurus, Reebok, and Mass General Brigham. What struck me was the sameness of the sites. Each not only had sections touting their missions, values, career offerings, and work in the community, but they used a lot of the same en vogue, professional-class jargon in doing so.

Each site, for example, used the word “empower” in one form or another. Fidelity said they “believe in a future where everyone is empowered to shape their financial futures and improve their lives.” At DraftKings, they “strive to create a place where all feel safe. Empowered. Engaged.” If you’re a “member of our talent community,” as Mass General Brigham puts it, then MGB is “a place that empowers your innovative approach.”

Speaking of innovation, that’s another word that gets a workout. State Street offers “innovative technology…so you can succeed in tomorrow’s financial markets.” As does “thrive” (Liberty Mutual has “created a place where all employees can truly thrive”) and “authentic” (Reebok “continues to boldly move forward with authenticity”). And then there’s DEI. Not only were “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” used on most sites, but they were frequently accompanied by terms like “foster,” “strive,” and “commit.”

Reebok: “We strive to create a safe and inclusive work environment where all employees feel valued and engaged.”

State Street: “We foster an inclusive environment where everyone feels valued, respected, and empowered [!] to contribute.”

Fidelity: “Embracing diversity and fostering inclusion are key to innovation [!], and we remain committed to firmly embedding diversity and inclusion in our business.”

I want to be careful here, because it’s not always easy to judge a company’s intentions. But isn’t it odd that the companies used so much of the same language to talk about DEI and that so much of that language was, well, kind of squishy? Did they fear saying something, but also fear not saying something? If so, in at least one case, that calculus seems to have shifted. When I went back in April to double-check all of those quotes, Fidelity had seemingly scrubbed the DEI language I saw a month earlier. Nothing squishy about that.

Then again, maybe squishy language is better than language that people don’t understand, which is the broader problem with many social justice terms. Last November, after Democrats lost the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, the research organization YouGov polled people about their understanding of 30 social justice terms. The results were telling: 39 percent of people said they’d never heard or didn’t know the meaning of “toxic masculinity,” while 52 percent said the same about “microaggression.” A whopping 69 percent of people didn’t know or understand “intersectionality,” while 72 percent were baffled by “BIPOC.”

What happens when someone uses jargon—in politics, at work, anywhere—that we don’t understand? Brown says it depends on who the speaker is. If it’s the CEO of your company or someone in your “in” group who has high status, you generally assume you’re the problem and start trying to figure out what they’re talking about. But if the speaker is a peer or a stranger, your reaction is likely to be different—more defensive. Why are you talking that way? Why are you showing off? Or, as Brown puts it, “What, you think you’re better than me?”

I believe the paragraph above neatly summarizes—nutshells?—what’s happened to Democrats in recent years. Starting roughly a decade ago, and certainly in the George Floyd summer of 2020, left-wing academics and activists—many of them Black—saw their status rise. And with good reason: They had expertise in issues affecting the country. As their status grew, people with lesser status in these areas—including some white, professional-class liberals—began to adopt the language these experts used, from “privilege” and “systemic” to “communities of color.” At which point, plenty of other liberals started using these phrases, too.

All of which might have been fine, except for the tens of millions of people who weren’t part of this cultural conversation or disagreed politically. Their first reaction: I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. Their second reaction: What, you think you’re better than me?

I’m not arguing that the backlash against DEI is wholly, or even mostly, about language. Prejudice, to use an old-fashioned word, still exists. And there are lots of people who’ll acknowledge America’s past sins but aren’t convinced that continuing to harp on identity solves the problem. But I do wonder what would have happened if, instead of talking about “diversity, equity, and inclusion”—words people had to look up—we talked about “fairness, decency, and opportunity,” words they already understood.

You know who uses words people understand? Donald Trump. Trump is often mocked for talking to his supporters at a fourth-grade level, but none of them ever accuse him of acting superior. What’s more, plenty of Trump voters will tell you they don’t agree with him on everything. Many will even say they don’t much like the guy—he’s an ass. But they seem to appreciate the fact that he says what he thinks. He is…what’s the word? Authentic. But not corporate-website authentic. Authentically authentic.

In any case, I don’t have to tell you who voters empowered in the last election.

Illustration by Dale Stephanos

It’s possible a correction is already under way when it comes to Elite Speak, although not in a way I feel good about. The federal government has banished scores of social-justice-coded terms from its websites. As have corporations like Fidelity, despite all the striving and thriving they were promising a few years ago. And with colleges being targeted and outspoken international students being rounded up, you can feel the chill in the air.

Having to watch what you say is pretty much the definition of an unfree country, and on that level, I’m inclined to retract everything I’ve said in this story and urge you, my professional-class compadre, to use as much Elite Speak as possible. Out of pure defiance.

But I’m not sure that will solve the problem. So maybe we should table the idea.

We can circle back. I’ll reach out.

Another person I talked to for this piece was Elizabeth Lowrey, an award-winning designer with Boston’s Elkus Manfredi Architects. I emailed her when I started working on this article, but I didn’t hear back for more than a week.

When we finally spoke, she explained the delay. At first, she wasn’t sure she had much to offer on this topic, but then she started thinking about the role she often finds herself playing in business situations. “I see myself as a host,” she said, by which she meant she wants everyone in a meeting to feel comfortable and to understand what’s being said. Sometimes that means asking people to explain a little more.

As communication metaphors go, it’s a pretty good one. Think of yourself as a host, not wanting anyone to feel left out, not wanting anyone to not understand.

Maybe—Trump’s top-down censorship aside—this is already beginning to happen from the bottom up, disruption-style. Startup Boston’s Stephanie Roulic says that she and her peers now make fun of some of the language they hear themselves using. “Like ‘circle back,’ or ‘synergy,’” she tells me. “I think now as a community we poke fun at ourselves. It’s not stopping us completely, because we’re still totally going to be using those phrases in emails. It’s just that we recognize sometimes how cringeworthy they sound.”

Hey, it’s a start. So what do you say we prioritize this work, lean in, broaden the permission structure for players in this space, focus on deliverables? Because who knows what could happen if we found alignment and worked together, in partnership—your talent community and mine—and started dialoguing like human beings again.

This article was first published in the print edition of the June 2025 issue with the headline: “Say What?”