[ recap ]

Last week we looked analog resurgence and Walter Benjamin's "aura": what gets lost when art is mechanically reproduced? 2026 answer: people choose what can't be copied.

[ thoughts ]

Read this sentence and tell me what it means:

"As a global leader grounded in a mission to growth-hack and circle back to the human spirit, I have always aspired to grasp exponential connections."

Take a moment. What is this person actually saying?

The answer: nothing. That sentence was generated by a "corporate bullshit generator" for a Cornell study published in March 2026. Researcher Shane Littrell fed the generator corporate jargon and let it produce meaningless combinations. Then he showed these sentences to over 1,000 office workers alongside real quotes from Fortune 500 executives.

The workers who rated generated nonsense as "business savvy" scored worse on tests of analytical thinking and workplace decision-making. They also felt more inspired by their company's mission statements. They rated their bosses as more charismatic. And they were more likely to use the same empty language themselves.

The study calls this the "corporate bullshit receptivity scale."

In 1946, George Orwell wrote "Politics and the English Language" with the same diagnosis: bad writing spreads like disease. You start using ready-made phrases because they're convenient. Soon you're not actually thinking, you're just assembling prefabricated sentences.

Orwell's core claim: "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."

Bad language makes foolish thoughts easier. Foolish thoughts produce worse language. He compared it to alcoholism: "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks."

Political language, Orwell argued, is designed to obscure. "To make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

You can't defend brutal policy in plain language, so you develop specialized vocabulary. Bombing villages becomes "pacification." Mass deportation becomes "transfer of population."

Vague language protects the writer from their own meaning. You can write "a number of personnel were impacted by the restructuring initiative" without confronting the fact that you fired twelve people.

[ creativity ]

In 2011, the CIA released its internal style manual through a Freedom of Information Act request. Written for intelligence analysts whose reports go to policymakers and operations officers.

It opened: "Good intelligence depends in large measure on clear, concise writing. The information CIA gathers and the analysis it produces mean little if we cannot convey them effectively."

Vague language in intelligence reports gets people killed.

The manual reads like Orwell's essay.

"Keep the language crisp and pungent; prefer the forthright to the pompous and ornate."

"Be frugal in the use of adjectives and adverbs; let nouns and verbs show their own power."

"A phrase that is too imprecise in some contexts. A number of troops were killed. (If you do not know how many, say an unknown number.)"

The parenthetical is the point. "A number of" doesn't just sound vague, it reveals what you don't know. Either state the number or admit you don't have it.

David Foster Wallace taught the same principle: Why say "utilise" instead of "use"? Why "individual" instead of "person"? More syllables doesn't mean more precision. It's just puffed up. Why say "prior to" rather than "before"? And if you're going to use "prior to," the Latin root means you should say "posterior to" for after. But nobody says "posterior to" because it sounds ridiculous. So why say "prior to"?

Wallace's warning: "This is the downside of starting to pay attention. You start noticing all the people who say 'at this time' rather than 'now'—why did they take up 1/3 second of my lifetime making me parse 'at this time' rather than just saying 'now' to me?"

[ making ]

Take one sentence you wrote this week and apply one rule.

Cut passive voice:

Before: "The decision was made to restructure"

After: "We decided to restructure"

What changed: The passive hid who decided. Active voice forces you to name them.

Replace vague quantities:

Before: "A significant number of users complained"

After: "47 users complained out of 10,000 active accounts"

What changed: Do you know the number? If not, you were hiding your ignorance behind "significant."

Cut hedge words:

Before: "The results were quite promising"

After: "Revenue doubled"

What changed: "Quite promising" is editorial. The number is factual.

[ sign off ]

We're seeing a surge in people starting to write. Julia Cameron advocated for her "Morning Pages": a daily practice of writing three pages of longhand, stream-of-consciousness thoughts first thing in the morning.

I personally write every day using Obsidian.

See you next Sunday, anonymous reader.