4 min readMar 2, 2026 06:00 AM IST
First published on: Mar 2, 2026 at 06:00 AM IST
Language, we are told, reflects reality. This is one of those statements that sounds profound until you spend five minutes on LinkedIn. Language does not reflect reality. It edits it. Sometimes gently, sometimes with the enthusiasm of a PR team armed with adjectives. Words are social agreements about what we will name honestly and what we will dress up before letting it step outside. Invented words are the most revealing of all. They arrive exactly when older words begin to feel rude. Or morally awkward. When saying the thing plainly threatens to make everyone in the room uncomfortable.
Take the word humbling. In its earlier incarnation, to be humbled meant to be brought down a notch or three. History did it. Failure did it. Occasionally, reality did it. Today, humbling has found a more glamorous calling. It now appears reliably at moments of triumph, usually under photographs featuring awards, stages and a carefully practised expression of accidental success. “Feeling humbled to receive this honour,” the caption reads. The photograph, meanwhile, tells a more detailed story. Professional lighting. Strategic angling. Rivals discreetly cropped out. The genius of humbling lies in its efficiency. It allows achievement to announce itself while pretending to apologise for the inconvenience. Success becomes something that happened to you. You didn’t chase it, plan it, or want it very badly. It arrived. Like grace. Or good weather.
This is not humility. It is reputational hygiene. A term emptied of its original meaning and refilled with moral comfort. Ambition, once naked and vaguely embarrassing, is now deodorised.
Corporate language has been running this playbook for decades. Consider the disappearance of the “back office”. The phrase carried too much anthropology. It suggested hierarchy. Invisibility. Labour without applause. So it had to go. In its place arrived the global capability centre, a term so optimistic it sounds like a Davos breakout session. A GCC does not exist because labour is cheaper. It exists because “capability is global”. It does not process payroll. It “builds value”. It does not support the business. It “partners” it. The work remains exactly the same, but the language performs a small miracle. Dignity is redistributed without touching the balance sheet.
Layoffs follow the same script. Companies no longer fire people. They “rightsize”. Or worse, they undertake “workforce optimisation”. No one loses a job. Roles are “impacted”. This is language doing emotional damage control. The passive voice steps in to protect the organisation’s self-image.
Start-ups, meanwhile, have elevated invented words to an art form. Failure is not failure. It is pivoting, a word borrowed from sport to suggest athletic agility. Losses are called burn, a term that sounds energetic, almost heroic. A company without revenue is not broken. It is pre-revenue. Even precarity has learned to speak fluently. Gig workers are not employees. They are partners. Their lack of security becomes flexibility. Their exposure to risk is reframed as freedom. What would once have been called exploitation is redescribed as lifestyle. Language aestheticises the imbalance.
Culture mirrors the same instinct. Adulting is a word that pretends to celebrate responsibility while lowering expectations. It treats basic competence as an occasional performance rather than a social baseline. Self-care, once a language of repair, has also expanded its brief. It now frequently functions as a language of exemption. Sometimes this is necessary. Often it is simply convenient.
What unites all these invented words is not dishonesty in the crude sense. It is something more collaborative. A shared agreement to soften reality so modern life remains tolerable. Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure told us that the relationship between words and meaning is arbitrary. Our age has taken that insight and turned it into a lifestyle choice. We invent words not because reality has changed, but because our tolerance for naming it plainly has thinned. Invented words allow ambition to coexist with virtue, inequality with optimism, and anxiety with aesthetics. They are the linguistic equivalent of soft lighting and flattering angles.
Their real power is not that they fool others. It is that they allow us to recognise ourselves in the mirror without flinching. Which is why we keep inventing them. Reality, after all, has terrible manners.
The writer is a senior advisory professional
