The projector hums at a frequency that makes the 5 tiny bones in my middle ear vibrate like a tuning fork. I am watching a laser pointer dance across a slide labeled ‘FY 2025 Synergy Map,’ and for the life of me, I can’t look away from the VP’s left cufflink. It is a miniature gold skull with 5 ruby teeth. He is talking about ‘frictionless cross-functional integration’ and ‘right-sizing our human capital infrastructure.’

My brain is currently a blender containing 15 shards of an Attic black-figure amphora and the chorus of ‘Karma Chameleon,’ which has been looping behind my eyes for 5 hours straight. Red, gold, and green. Every time he says the word ‘deliverable,’ the song gets louder. I find myself wondering if he knows that ‘deliverable’ used to be an adjective, not a noun that eats people’s weekends for breakfast.

The Burial of Meaning

I’m sitting in the back row because it’s the only place where I can discreetly sketch the outline of the VP’s jawline without looking like I’m taking notes on his revolutionary insights. As an archaeological illustrator, my job is to find the truth in the rubble. I spend my days looking at things that have survived 1225 years of neglect, trying to recreate the exact curve of a handle or the jagged edge of a fracture. In archaeology, if you mislabel a fragment, you lose the history. If you call a ritual vessel a ‘storage jar,’ you’ve lied to the future.

“

But here, in this room with its 35 identical chairs and its scent of stale espresso and expensive anxiety, language isn’t used to reveal. It’s used to bury.

“

My boss leaned over 25 minutes ago and whispered that we need to ‘action the deliverables to leverage our synergies.’ I nodded, because that’s what you do when you want to keep your 401k, but I have no idea what he actually wants me to do. Does he want me to finish the drawings for the catalog? Or is he asking me to spiritually align my soul with the company’s quarterly growth targets?

The Bleached Sea

This is the weaponization of the English language. We are drowning in a sea of words that have been bleached of their meaning until they are as white and hollow as the bones in a desert. I once spent 5 weeks in a trench near Corinth, and I learned more about human communication from a 2305-year-old graffito on a wall than I have from the last 15 all-hands meetings.

When the VP says ‘strategic realignment,’ he means that 55 people are going to lose their jobs on Tuesday. He uses the phrase because ‘firing the people who sit next to you’ is a sentence that carries weight. It has a smell. It has a heartbeat. ‘Strategic realignment’ is a ghost. It’s a phantom that floats through the office, and you can’t punch a phantom.

The Machine Mask

I caught myself using the word ‘bandwidth’ yesterday… As soon as the word left my mouth, I felt a physical pang of disgust. I am not a router. I do not have a data transfer rate. I was tired. I was overwhelmed. But ‘bandwidth’ felt safer than saying, ‘I am sad and tired and I need to sit in the dark for 5 hours.’

This degradation of language is a symptom of a much deeper degradation of thought. When we stop using specific words, we stop having specific thoughts… We become like the people who lived in the late stages of the Roman Empire, where the official inscriptions became increasingly grandiose as the actual power of the state crumbled into the dust.

Fear of Intimacy

There is a profound loneliness in corporate speak. It’s the sound of people trying very hard not to be seen. If I use the word ‘touchpoint’ instead of ‘conversation,’ I am putting a layer of plastic between me and you. I am telling you that this interaction is a transaction, a point on a graph, rather than a moment between two humans who are both going to be dead in 75 years.

I think about the work of MagicWave, where the focus is on the human pulse of a story rather than the hollow metrics of a slide deck. It’s a reminder that we are starved for something real. We are wandering through a forest of ‘value-adds’ and ‘asynchronous workflows’ looking for a single clear stream of water.

MagicWave

In my illustrations, I have to be precise to the millimeter… Why don’t we demand that same precision from our leaders? Why do we allow them to speak in clouds of ink, like 5 frightened octopuses trying to escape a predator?

Starting the Rebellion

I’m back in the meeting, and the VP is now talking about ‘optimizing the synergistic feedback loops.’ My drawing of his jawline is finished. I’ve added 5 small lines of tension around his mouth that he probably doesn’t even know are there. He looks tired, too. Beneath the ‘best-in-class’ vocabulary and the gold cufflinks, he’s just another guy who probably has a song stuck in his head… Maybe he hates these words as much as I do.

We have to scrape away the layers of corporate soot to find the original painting underneath… But if we don’t do it, we’re going to wake up in 15 years and realize we’ve forgotten how to say anything at all.

The Final Deliverable

I pack up my sketchbook as the meeting ends. People are standing up, smoothing their suits, and ‘circling back’ to each other in the hallway. I walk past the 5-gallon water cooler and head for the elevator. As the doors close, I find myself humming the chorus of that song again. Red, gold, and green. It’s a nonsense song, really, but at least it knows it’s a nonsense song. It isn’t trying to ‘disrupt the paradigm.’ It’s just a melody.