What’s a word or phrase that annoys you?
The Words We Murdered
A poem on the slow death of meaning
I remember when words were small and true — the way love fit inside a chest without needing explanation, the way tired meant something a night’s sleep could answer, the way broken was said only when something had actually fallen and shattered on the floor.
I remember when language was the house we lived in, not the product we were selling, not the pitch deck left on someone’s desk in a room that smelled of recycled air and quiet desperation.
But I have sat in too many rooms since then. I have heard too many words that no longer know what they mean.
There is a grief in this — I want you to know that. Not the loud grief of funerals and salt, but the soft grief of watching something you once loved become unrecognizable.
The grief of hearing synergy spoken with the straight face of a believer while everyone in the room looks down at their notebooks and writes nothing.
Synergy. As though connection were a formula. As though the meeting of two human minds could be scheduled for Thursday at two and measured in quarterly outcomes.
I sat across from a man once. The man who told me we needed to leverage our bandwidth before we could move the needle. I nodded. What next? I smiled. I died a little behind my eyes and no one noticed. Because we were all dying together in the same fluorescent light.
Then I Stepped Outside
And then I stepped outside — into the other world. The one that lives on small bright screens and speaks in the language of vibes and eras.
I watched a woman hold a coffee cup up to a terracotta wall and call it aesthetic. I watched a man describe his lunch as part of his wellness journey. And, I watched a girl say she was so done with toxic energy while the caption glowed: protecting my peace.
And I wanted to ask — what peace? Where is it? Show me the coordinates. Tell me if it manifested on its own or if it needed a vision board, a morning routine, a supplements stack, a thirty-day reset.
Tell me if authenticity looks like this — the careful lighting, the strategic vulnerability, the confession edited down to what performs best before noon.
Am I? Am I Not?
I am not innocent. Also, I want to say that plainly, in the middle of this poem where you might expect me to be clean.
I have said I’m on a journey. I have said let’s circle back. Also, I have said this is my authentic self while performing a version of myself I had rehearsed the night before.
Language corrupts the ones who use it. That is the thing no one tells you — that you will one day open your mouth and hear someone else’s words come out, worn smooth as river stones, meaning nothing, going nowhere, carried along by the current of a conversation that was never really happening.
There is a word — pivot — that used to belong to dancers.
I think of them sometimes, the ones who trained for years to make the body eloquent, who understood that turning required weight, and ground, and intention — that you could not pivot without knowing exactly where you stood.
Now it belongs to startups. Now it means: what we were doing wasn’t working so we changed everything and called it strategy.
Moreover, Now it means: we are afraid but we will dress that fear in the language of momentum.
I mourn the dancers. I mourn the turning. And, I mourn the word that used to know what it cost to change direction.
Slay, They Say
Slay, they say, and I understand the lineage — I know where it came from, the communities that forged it in fire and survival, the ones who made beauty a form of resistance.
But I have heard it said over mediocre spreadsheets. I have heard it said about someone’s ability to send a well-formatted email.
And that is not slaying. That is not even trying. That is the slow erasure of a word that once meant: I survived something and I made it look like flying.
I Am Too
What I am trying to say — what I have been trying to say through all of this — is that words are not decoration.
They are the architecture of thought. They are the way we reach across the impossible distance between one interior life and another.
When we hollow them out, when we use them so often and so carelessly that they become ambient noise, we are not just losing vocabulary.
We are losing the rooms where understanding used to live.
We are leaving each other more alone.
I still believe in words. That is the melancholy of this — not cynicism, not contempt, but a love that has been tested by too much exposure to language used as weapon, as armor, as performance, as filler, as the sound we make when we do not want to say what we actually mean.
I still reach for the precise word the way you reach for a lamp in a dark room — not knowing exactly where it is, but certain that light exists, that it is worth the reaching.
I still believe that somewhere beneath the jargon and the noise, beneath the synergies and journeys and the carefully curated authentic moments, there are people who want to say something true.
Who are tired — genuinely tired — of words that weigh nothing.
Who want to be asked how are you and feel, just once, that the question was a door and not a formality, not a checkbox, not a meeting agenda item labeled culture and connection.
Before I Forget
So I am writing this down before I forget what it felt like to believe that language could carry the full weight of a life.
Before I, too, learn to speak in the comfortable emptiness of words everyone uses and no one means.
Before the grief becomes so ordinary that I stop calling it grief. And start calling it part of the process.
Before I smile and nod and say: Let’s take this offline.
Before I forget that offline is where I live. That offline is where we all live — in the unoptimized, unfiltered, un-aesthetic truth of what it means to be a person in a world that keeps asking us to be a brand.
The Ultimate Truth
I want to say one true thing before I go.
In fact, am tired of the words we murdered on the altar of relevance.
I am tired of bandwidth and pivot and manifest. I am tired of toxic applied to Tuesdays. So many things. I am tired of vibe as a replacement for feeling. I am tired of slay said softly, without risk. Also, I am tired of journey that goes nowhere, authentic that means nothing, synergy that leaves everyone sitting in the same room, more alone than when they arrived.
I want the old words back — the ones with soil under their fingernails, the ones that knew what it meant to be said once and mean it.
I want to say I love you and have it land like something irreplaceable.
In fact, I want to say I’m lost and have someone understand that I do not mean I need better navigation.
I want to say help in a room that doesn’t reframe it as an opportunity.
Just help. Just that.
One small, true, unoptimized word —
still waiting to mean something.
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