Hidden or overshadowed by U.S.
President Trump’s coined term, fake news, American retail’s utterly
contrived, and thus fake jargon went unscathed by consumers in first few
decades of the twentieth century. Even nonverbally acknowledging the verbiage spewed
out by employees and even front-line managers in a retail store or coffee shop
as if the jargon were legitimate subtly enables and thus extenuates the sordid
trend. Were enough customers to question and even object to the “corporate
correct” lines, perhaps the feedback would move its way up managerial hierarchies
and result in cleaner, more transparent conversation at the store level. To the
extent that business culture pervades a society, changes are greater that the verbal
artifice will be received as if it were real, and thus a valid way of
communicating. Perhaps the more general question concerns the extent to which
linguistic artifice saturates American culture and has even come to be viewed
as genuine. The subtle influence of business culture in America may be vastly overlooked.
The full essay is at "Retail-Speak American Style."
