Retail-Speak American Style

Hidden or overshadowed by U.S. President Trump’s coined term, fake news, American retail’s utterly contrived, and thus fake jargon went unscathed by consumers in first few decades of the twentieth century. Even nonverbally acknowledging the verbiage spewed out by employees and even front-line managers in a retail store or coffee shop as if the jargon were legitimate subtly enables and thus extenuates the sordid trend. Were enough customers to question and even object to the “corporate correct” lines, perhaps the feedback would move its way up managerial hierarchies and result in cleaner, more transparent conversation at the store level. To the extent that business culture pervades a society, changes are greater that the verbal artifice will be received as if it were real, and thus a valid way of communicating. Perhaps the more general question concerns the extent to which linguistic artifice saturates American culture and has even come to be viewed as genuine. The subtle influence of business culture in America may be vastly overlooked.

Perhaps the most contrived verbiage utilized strategically by retail managements is, I do apologize. Especially fake is the corporate apology when for your inconvenience is added. That the customer has been inconvenienced by a managerial decision that is in the financial interest of the company without the manager being willing to compensate the customer in any way for the “inconvenience” renders the word itself, as well as the apology, utterly fake. It may even be considered to be passive aggressive, especially if the manager could offer to compensate the aggrieved customer. An apology is not in itself compensation, even if it feels good to hear the word, but such a feeling should not lead to the conclusion that the apology is genuine. In fact, customer-service employees, such as at call centers, are trained to apologize for virtually anything because apologizing is free. In a pro-business societal culture, customers may leap to the conclusion that even such an apology, even when a company wrongs a customer and the management could compensate the person for the harm or cost but refuses, is genuine. The astute customer might reply, unfortunately I cannot accept your apology because your company has not solved the problem but could do so. The use of the word unfortunately is just as fake as when it is used by an employee or manager as if the outcome were unfortunate also for the company, which is not the case because it benefits financially by not solving the problem or compensating the customer. 

The underlying brain sickness behind the corporate apology can be detected when, after replying, unfortunately I cannot accept your apology, the customer is treated to yet another apology! With such passive aggression (i.e., in the sheer disregard and thus disrespect of what the customer has just said), the angered customer could also be repetitive: Unfortunately, I cannot accept your apology. Astonishingly, even that statement may be insufficient to stop the verbal diarrhea on the other end. Perhaps the line of apology as an appeasement strategy is so entrained by supervisors that the underlying pathology triggered in the employee lies in the brain’s reversion to a primitive, reptilian stage.

Another, not so passive aggressive, instance of fake managerial jargon in retail is the fake greeting as a customer enters a store. When done by security guards, however, any greeting is inherently passive aggressive. Translated into real meaning, such a greeting as welcome means Just so you know, I’ll be watching you. The managerial decision to fuse the two roles of greeter and security guard at the entrance of a store reveals not only a basic disregard for the comfort of customers, but also an unconscious sadism, wherein the infliction of discomfort and even pain in another person gives pleasure to the culprit.

The sheer fakeness of greetings by employees and store managers when customers are entering a store even before they are oriented to the new surroundings can be seen in Starbuck’s corporate directive to have store employees say Welcome in to customers as they enter, as if welcome and come in make any sense fused together. An astute customer could reply, Greetings! Such a way of saying hello is so stilted that it can communicate the acknowledgement that the communication is utterly contrived and fake rather than genuine. Perhaps the way to eventually end the linguistic managerial fakeness is to give employees and store managers a of their own crap in return. The exchange of genuine and fake, from customers and employees, respectively, is unfair to the customers, as it is insulting to speak genuinely only to receive trite, contrived pieces of company jargon, especially if every employee is utilizing the same words.

A third instance of contrived jargon concerns a retail company’s managerial decision to revert to Happy Holidays immediately after Halloween, as if the words Thanksgiving and Christmas were toxic even though both holidays are official U.S. holidays and thus completely legitimate in all of the member-states (each of which recognized both holidays, at least as of 2026). To single out two major holidays as if they constituted cups of bland, generic water is not only dogmatic, but also passive aggressive against Americans who legitimately express positive sentiments about either or both of the two holidays. It is interesting—meaning ideologically convenient—that on the day after Christmas, the same employees who had been saying Happy Holidays suddenly can’t stop saying, Happy New Years. The fact that not every American celebrates every holiday does not invalidate any of the official holidays; nor does the fact that some people dislike an official holiday. 

It is arrogant, even presumptuous, to demand that other people refuse to acknowledge an official holiday that a person dislikes. In enabling this sordid, even pathological mentality by substituting the passive aggressive “greeting” Happy Holidays for Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas, retail managers, whether in stores face to face with customers or in corporate management, do not realize that the appeasement is both enabling and passive aggressive. The astute customer could think of an equally generic response to convey a refusal to accept the squalid subterfuge as if it were not actually hostile and ideological. Perhaps Have a happy 24 hour period may be sufficient to convey the acknowledgement of the unsuitability of the generic holiday “greeting,” but something else equally generic and more oriented to holidays may be better suited as a reply. “Wishing” employees Happy Holidays for every other holiday is one possible tactic. 

If the generic holiday applies to Thanksgiving and Christmas, then the same greeting applies to Independence Day, Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Halloween. After all, some American Black people object to the first holiday due to slavery existing when the Declaration of Independence was announced on July 4, 1776, some Quakers may object to Veterans Day and even Memorial Day, and some rich industrialists in labor-management disputes might object to Labor Day. Evangelical Christians may object to Halloween due to its devilish connotations, preferring instead All Saints Day on the next day. Is the name of every American holiday to be forbidden in retail settings just because at least somebody objects to a given holiday? It is unfair to capitulate to only the detractors who harshly accost people who mention Thanksgiving or Christmas by name. In doing the bidding of those detractors, retail managements take sides ideologically and even impose the ideological bias on customers whose mention of either or both of the two legal holidays is entirely legitimate and therefore should not be countered with Happy Holidays as a virtual slap on the face. Astute customers may dismissively retort, also in passive aggression, Of course you do, as well as wield the Happy Holidays club themselves on every other legal (and other) holiday.

The extent to which retail managers in stores and even at corporate headquarters engage in what is really passive aggression in the guise of appeasing customers so not to lose any has not been made transparent to the vast majority of American consumers. Taking Happy Holidays superficially at face value enables the grinches who have lashed out verbally at employees merely for saying Happy Thanksgiving or Merry Christmas. Employees and managers alike should have replied, Thanksgiving (or Christmas) is a national holiday in the United States. The corporate path of least resistance can itself be problematic, especially if enough consumers in America become aware of the sheer manipulative artifice being utilized in the retail sector and are offended by the ungenuine, scripted replies by employees and store managers. Resisting the generics with generics may cure the patient or at least shift the disease to defense.

Ideological Word Games: The Modern Weapon of Choice?

When I was young, my dad would sometimes criticize me for engaging in “word games.” Perhaps I was already parsing words; my parents and maternal grandfather were all lawyers. My last name is Worden, after all. I was raised to pronounce the name, war-den, and only after decades did it occur to me that people might spell the name as Worden rather than Warden if I pronounced it as word-n. I was the first even in the extended family to use the alternative; as Nietzsche wrote, no philosopher is a man of his time. We tend to think outside the proverbial constrained “box” because we critique assumptions and arguments (i.e., critical thinking), including those of the “boxes” that society leaves unquestionably standing as part of the status quo—the tyranny of which has repelled philosophers wetted to the idea that no stone should be left unturned, even if a society deems some stones as sacrosanct. It can be dangerous even to question the solidity of those stones, especially if they formed out of ideological controversies wherein tussling instinctual urges contesting for societal dominance. In this too, I am drawing on Nietzsche, who even viewed the content of ideas as being instinctual urges. In being willing to subject societally cherished ideas to fundamentally unique and deep scrutiny, Friedrich Nietzsche is the last, at least as of my time living in an American desert, both academically and geographically, where plenty of Nietzsche’s “herd animals” freely roamed. They were particularly vulnerable to ideological word-games in unquestioningly accepting the words from the insurgent ideologies as valid.

For example, the mindless expression used by retail employees, “Have a good one!” had become ubiquitous by 2020 in America even though no antecedent is mentioned for the pronoun, one. “Have a good what?” I would sometimes answer. The response would be even worse, such as “Whatever you want!” so I vanquished that experiment with truth. Why had “Have a good day!” or “Thanks for shopping here” succumbed to a vacuous “one”? To be sure, the grammatical error was more of an indication that business schools, like law and medical schools, should accept students for their respective first degrees after those students have earned a first degree in another school, such as that of the liberal arts and sciences, so the basics are not truncated. Certainly no passive aggression is involved in the ungrammatical expression.

Such aggression, I submit, underlies some cases of word games wherein ideological advocates insist that their respective instinctual urges, which include dominance, be accepted by adopting a questionable word-change even though it renders comparisons highly (yet invisibly!) unfair. Not by accident, the linguistic “game board” is tilted. People who do not play along with the change, perhaps because they can sniff the obvious yet hushed ideological game, can unfairly be subject to presumptuous pressure to use the new word appropriately. In short, the assertion, “That word [or comparison] is [now] inappropriate” can be used as a weapon.

For example, by 2020 the words male and female had come to be regularly extended from animals to human beings. So whereas formerly a person might ask, “Is your dog a female?” it had become proper to ask, for example, “Was the driver a female?”  The same applied to the word, male. Initially, I would answer such a derogatory question with, “You mean was the driver a woman?” In answering my question affirmatively, the person, whether a man or woman, would tacitly acknowledge that the use of the word female was based on a conformist ideology. Feminists could have used implicit comparisons, such as in the statement, “Was the driver a male or a woman?” and anti-feminists could have resorted to, “Was the driver a man or a female?” I had not heard such comparisons being made, but just in reading the two questions I can detect passive aggression. Indeed, that would likely be the purpose behind the respective wordings.

Racial hatred could also manifest through comparisons. On February 12, 2020, President Lincoln’s birthday ironically, a political reporter on National Public Radio discussing the previous day’s 2020 New Hampshire presidential primary said that the state is “mostly white so African Americans had not yet had the chance to be heard.” Then the reporter referred to Iowa and New Hampshire as “lily white.” This expression points to a racial bias, at least in regard to areas in which mostly Caucasians live. In using the actual name of the race, Caucasian, I am trying to correct for the convenient category mistake in the reporter’s comparison of whites with African Americans.” The latter term is an ethnic rather than a racial term. A Caucasian man from South Africa who has moved to American is an African American. That this term was invented by Jesse Jackson, a civil rights activist, is a hint as to the ideological impetus behind the ideologically-driven intension behind the switch from “Black,” a racial term, to “African American,” an ethnic immigrant term. The force of the ideology is responsible for the category mistake. On two occasions, I made statements in which the axis of comparison is skewed in the other direction. One interesting example is, “Caucasians and Blacks can get along.” Even in spite of the friendly idea, my acquaintance scolded me. “Don’t use Caucasian.” Yet if I had used “whites” instead, as in “Whites and Blacks can get along”—a statement that Martin Luther King likely said many times—a Caucasian with a certain ideological bias would likely have corrected me, insisting that I use “African American” rather than “Black” even though the former is not a term that refers to a race! Passive aggression fueled by an insurgent ideology can all too willingly rip through reasoning. Nietzsche would say that such reasoning is itself a tussle of instinctual urges, the most dominant in this case being one that clashes with the urge behind the ideology.

I submit that many people take words and linguistic comparisons at face level only. The real uses, at the ideological (and even instinctual urge) level, are frequently overlooked. The operative assumption is that in the selection of words, even in comparison to others, speakers and writers are ideologically neutral. The encroaching natural tendency of an ideology (and the instinctual urges behind it) is not recognized in its fullness. I submit that both the overlooking and the selection can be done unconsciously, though conscious intent in the selection can also exist. The person who feels a little uncomfortable but cannot identify why after hearing, “Was the driver a man or a female?” or “Was the driver Caucasian or Black?”---or even worse, “Was the driver a Caucasian woman or a Black male?”—unconsciously senses the ideological bias, especially if the listener’s ideology, and thus dominant urges, are at odds with the bias. The listener who knows that the comparisons are insulting or otherwise diminutive to one gender or one race also knows that passive aggression was involved. Sadly, the human “race” can be too creative and subtle in turning something into a weapon. At the very least, making specific instances of linguistic weapons transparent to other people can be done such that those instances may lose their fangs in the antiseptic of sunlight.