(Cory Doctorow) Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment

[LearnedHand]

This is Doctorow’s musings about the research reported earlier this week, but it’s also a really good essay about language in general.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/19/jargon-watch/

I'm a writer, so of course I care about words! But I'm a writer, so I also think that words are improved by their malleability, duality and nuance.

This is one of the things I love about being a native English speaker – this glorious mongrel language of ours is full of extremely weird words, like "cleave," which means its own opposite ("to join together" and "to cut apart" ). English is full of these words that mean their own opposite, from "dust" to "oversight" to "weather":

[snip text link]

This is what you get when you let a language run wild, with meaning determined (and contested) by speakers. Not for nothing, my second language is Yiddish, another glorious higgeldy-piggeldy of a tongue with no authoritative oversight and innumerable dialects.

Semantic drift is a feature, not a bug. It's how we get new words, and new meanings for old words. I love semantic drift! I mean, I'd better, since, having coined "enshittification," I'm now destined to have a poop emoji on my headstone. Having coined a word – and having proposed a precise technical meaning for it – I am baffled by people who make it their business to scold others for using enshittification "incorrectly." "Enshittification" is less than five years old, and we know when and how it was invented. If you like it when I make up a word, you can't categorically object to other people making up new meanings for this word. I didn't need a word-coining license to come up with enshittification, and you don't need a semantic drift license to use it to mean something else.

[Cirsium]

1. Creative Commons

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

Link to the article:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/19/jargon-watch/

Link to the license:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

You are free to:

• Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially.

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[LearnedHand]

2. Crap thanks! I totally forgot the URL.

I added it to the OP too.