Acorns

Faramir said: he says it’s because it’s a stupid way to keep a tree. he says it always ends up dying, every time, because we don’t keep it propply.

Boromir said: don’t talk like a baby. And don’t say that! Mithrandir has never understood the duties of Stewards.

Faramir said: he says it isn’t politics, it’s gardening. he says we don’t let the roots go down deep enough, and they always hit stone, and white trees would keep growing forever-and-ever, if you let them; and if their roots can’t grow any more they always die, ‘cos it starves them, and that’s mean. it ought to be in the ground, and you shouldn’t keep a grown big tree on a - a - a - a PATIO, and not one at the top of a tower neither, a thousand feet above the plain, without enough food for a tree to eat. And that’s mean of us.

Boromir said: Mithrandir talks a lot of rubbish.

Faramir said: he says Minas Tirith has a proud tradition of killing saplings that are very rare, and he will only give us houseplants or tomatoes for presents until we get better at it. and he says that’s why the Lawn of Ecthelion is always yellow in summer too. Underneath the grass, there’s just a little dirt we brought here, and underneath that there’s the stone of the tower, which ‘vaporates, and it can’t hold very much water, for the grass to keep between rains.

Boromir said: actually - I do believe that. But the Lawn of Ecthelion always lives again - as soon as it rains.

Faramir said: yellow lawn grass isn’t dead, it’s just doormat. Waiting for the rain.

Boromir said: dormant.

Faramir said: maybe.

Boromir said: fine, fine, fine -

Boromir said: okay, Faramir, maybe you’re right. So what? What of it?

Faramir said: well, I don’t know. But I don’t like the tree anymore.

Boromir said: you don’t like the White Tree of Gondor.

Faramir said: I don’t like how it looks like we failed it. I don’t like it being dead. I don’t like to think of it starving to death. And I don’t like how it’s everywhere.

Boromir said: but the White Tree is alive everywhere else.

Faramir said: no look at it, Boromir, it’s dead.

Boromir said: no it isn’t, look. It’s alive on you and it’s alive on me. Look on mine. Look at the leaves. What’s that made of?

Faramir said: Broidery.

Boromir said: People don’t embroider all those leaves just to be on a dead tree.

Faramir said: is mine alive?

Boromir said: they all are. The only dead one is the one on the tower, and honestly, maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s a stupid place for a real tree.

Boromir said: look.

In real life a country cannot wait forever

For rain to come

Or a tree to grow

Or a king to come

Or summer to go,

Or a wizard to bring a tomato plant. 

There might be a perfect future someday,

But for now we have this day,

Which is our day,

And every other tree in the city is alive -

With leaves on it.

And on this day,

Which is our day,

I am going to sit on your head.

And what Faramir said after is lost to history,

For it mostly sounded like “gahaflarflarf.”

It's time we admitted that it's no good replacing an offensive term with a phrase that no one understands. Calling it "child sexual abuse material" is a good idea, but no one actually calls it that. The customary phrase is actually "child sexual abuse material, which most people call 'child porn,' but which we should really call 'child sex abuse material.'" If your goal is to avoid saying "child porn" (a laudable goal!), this isn't achieving it.

None of this means that I am immune to being rubbed up the wrong way by other people's language choices. Having been mentored by the science fiction great Damon Knight, I have been infected by many of his linguistic peccadillos, which means that if you say "out loud" in my earshot, I will (mentally) "correct" it to "aloud" (yes, "out loud" is fine, but Damon had a thing about it and it got stuck in my brain).

I am especially perturbed by "business English," the language of the commercial class, their cheerleaders in the press, and (alas) many of their critics. Anytime someone refers to a sector as a "space" (as in "I'm really getting into the AI space") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil. Superlatives like "thought-leader" are so self-parodying I have to check every time someone utters one aloud (see?) to verify that they're not being sarcastic. Objects of derision should be referred to by their surnames, not their given names ("Musk" is vituperative, "Elon" is friendly – though, thanks to the glorious and thickening contradictions of language, calling someone by their surname can also be affectionate). I steer clear of jargon used by firms to lionize themselves, like "hyperscaler."

I share the impulse to impose my linguistic preferences on the people around me. I just (mostly) suppress that impulse and try to focus on substance rather than style, at least when I'm trying to understand others and be understood by them. But yes, I do silently judge the people around me for their word choices – all the time.

That's why I immediately pounced on "The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes," an open access paper in the Feb 2026 edition of Personality and Individual Differences by Shane Littrell, a linguistics postdoc at Cornell:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/400597536_The_Corporate_Bullshit_Receptivity_Scale_Development_validation_and_associations_with_workplace_outcomes

Littrell set out to evaluate "corporate bullshit," a linguistic category that is separate from mere "jargon." Jargon, Littrell writes, is a professional vocabulary that serves a useful purpose: "facilitat[ing] communication and social bonding, increas[ing] fluency, and help[ing] reinforce a shared identity among in-group members."

Bullshit, meanwhile, is "semantically, logically, or epistemically dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative, or otherwise engaging." There's a whole field of bullshit studies, with investigations into such exciting topics as "pseudo-profound bullshit" (think: Deepak Chopra).

Littrell borrows from that field and others to investigate corporate bullshit, formulating a measurement index he calls the "Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale." In a series of three experiments, Littrell sets out to determine who is the most susceptible to corporate bullshit, and what the correlates of that receptivity are.

Littrell concludes that corporate bullshitters themselves are pretty good at identifying bullshit (they have a high "Organizational Bullshit Perception Score"). In other words, bullshitters know that they're bullshitting. When a corporate leader declares that:

This synergistic look at our thought leadership will ensure that we are decontenting and avoiding reputational deficits with our key takeaways as effectively as we can in order to sunset our resonating focus.

they know it's nonsense.

This reminded me of the idea that cult leaders tell obvious lies to their followers as a way of forcing them to demonstrate their subservience. When Trump demands that his followers wear clown shoes:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-is-obsessed-with-these-145-shoes-and-won-t-let-anyone-leave-without-a-pair/ar-AA1XOEBm

Or that they pretend that "mutilization" is a word:

https://www.wonkette.com/p/is-trumps-save-america-fck-america

He's engaging in a dominance play that forces his feuding princelings and their lickspittles to humiliate themselves and reaffirm his supremacy.

There are plenty of rank-and-file workers inside corporations who have high OBPSes and know when they're being bullshitted, but Littrell also identifies a large cohort of low-OBPS workers who are absolutely taken in by corporate bullshit.

Here we get to a fascinating dichotomy. Both the low-OBPS and high-OBPS workers can be described as being "open minded," but "open" has a very different meaning for each group. Workers who are good at spotting bullshit score high on open-mindedness metrics like "willingness to engage" and "willingness to reflect," both characteristic of the "fluid intelligence" that makes workers good at solving problems and doing a good job.

Meanwhile, workers who are taken in by bullshit are "open minded" in the sense that they are bad at analytical reasoning and thus easily convinced. These people test poorly on metrics like "logical reasoning" and "decision-making," and score high on "overconfidence in one's intellectual and analytic abilities." They are apt to make blunders that "expose organizations to financial, reputational, or legal risks."

But they're also exactly the workers who score high on "job satisfaction," "trust in one's supervisor," and "degree to which they are inspired by corporate mission statements." These people are so open minded that their brains start to leak out of their ears. Or, as Carly Page put it in The Register: "jargon sticks around not just because executives enjoy using it, but because many people respond to it as if it were genuine insight":

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/15/corporate_jargon_research/

This creates a feedback loop where bosses get rewarded for using empty and maddening phrases, and their workforce gets progressively more skewed towards people who are bad at spotting bullshit and at exercising their judgment on the job. It's quite a neat – and ugly – explanation of why bullshit proliferates within organizations, and how organizations come to be completely overrun with bullshit.

This is a fascinating research paper, and while I've focused on its conclusions, I really suggest going and reading about the methodology, especially the tables of "corporate bullshit" phrases they generated for their experiments (Tables 1, 2 and 3). This is some eldritch horror bullshit:

By solving the pain point of customers with our conversations, we will ideate a renewed level of end-state vision and growth-mindset in the market between us and others who are architecting to download on a similar balanced scorecard.

What's more, these are all based on real examples of corporate bullshit from leaders at large corporations, with a few words rotated to synonyms drawn from the business-press.