Stolen words badly worn

Posted on: 17 May 2026

There is a linguistic phenomenon that amuses and irritates me in equal measure, and it concerns words borrowed from a technical context, where they once carried a precise meaning, and then worn badly in different contexts until the original meaning was lost. It is not the ordinary semantic drift that languages produce through accumulation over time. It is something faster and sloppier, a kind of distracted theft in which someone steals a word because it sounds good, uses it without understanding it, and after a few years everyone uses it as he does rather than as it was conceived by whoever coined it. I amused myself this morning reconstructing the trajectory of four cases that strike me as exemplary, each drawn from a different disciplinary context. Resilience from mechanics, synergy from biology, algorithm from mathematics, mindfulness from Buddhism. Four thefts, four semantic degradations, one structural dynamic underneath.

Resilience, as anyone who has had the misfortune of working in a British company over the last decade will have discovered, has become the quality that every manager demands of his collaborators. One must be resilient, they say, in the face of restructuring, strategic pivots, headcount reductions, the new bosses who reverse what the old bosses built. One must be resilient in the face of climate change, of supply chain disruption, of pandemic recurrence. The Cabinet Office runs an entire National Resilience Strategy. The NHS has resilience teams. The City speaks of operational resilience. The problem is that resilience, as Thomas Tredgold defined it in 1818 when he introduced the term in mechanical engineering, is a specific property of materials, namely the capacity to absorb energy during elastic deformation and release it upon unloading, returning to the original shape without permanent damage. A spring is resilient. A steel cable within its elastic limit is resilient. A well-tempered material that absorbs a blow and returns to its prior state is resilient. None of these properties has anything to do with what human beings experience when they pass through a difficult event, because anyone who has been through bereavement, illness or separation does not return to the original shape, they are transformed into something else. There is a technical word for that other property in materials, and it is toughness, the capacity to absorb energy beyond the elastic limit, deforming permanently without fracturing. Toughness is what we actually demand of people, but "tough" sounds too Victorian, too working-class grandmother, while "resilient" carries that modern, vaguely scientific timbre that makes the demand sound like a neutral observation rather than a moral imposition. The theft of the engineering term serves to disguise the nature of the request. When a manager asks you to be resilient he is in fact asking you to endure in silence, but "endure in silence" would sound oppressive, whereas "be resilient" sounds almost like a compliment.

Synergy has an even more interesting history because it is born in two distinct technical fields, physiology and pharmacology, where it has a mathematically precise meaning. The term comes from the Greek συνεργία, working together, and was introduced into physiology in 1847 by the German pathologist Jacob Henle at Heidelberg to describe the coordination of different organs producing a single effect. In pharmacology, synergy is that specific phenomenon that occurs when the combined effect of two drugs is mathematically greater than the sum of their separate effects, a rare event that must be demonstrated through rigorous statistical models such as the Loewe Additivity or the Bliss Independence. I underline, rare and demonstrable. When two drugs simply produce additive effects, the term in pharmacology is additivism, not synergy. And yet in corporate boardrooms one speaks of synergy whenever two departments meet to do something together, regardless of whether the collaboration produces an amplifying effect or merely avoids duplication. The merger between two companies is sold to shareholders as an operation that will produce "synergies", which is almost always false, because in the majority of mergers the combined value of the two merged entities is lower than the sum of the values of the two entities standing alone, a phenomenon that is named with precisely the opposite term, value destruction. The literature on post-merger value destruction is by now substantial, and the proportion of mergers that genuinely create synergistic value rather than destroy it sits stubbornly somewhere between thirty and fifty per cent depending on which study one consults. Here too, the theft of the technical term serves to disguise a request different from the one declared. "Let us create synergies" almost always means "let us share office space and save on rent", which is cooperation, and not even particularly good cooperation.

The algorithm is the most paradoxical case, because the word comes from the name of a ninth-century Persian mathematician, Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, who worked at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad between 813 and 833 under the caliph al-Maʾmūn. When his treatises were translated into Latin in the twelfth century, the name al-Khwārizmī became Algoritmi, and from there algorithm. Technically, an algorithm is a finite, deterministic, well-defined procedure for solving a problem. To put it concretely, a recipe is an algorithm, the instructions for assembling an Ikea wardrobe are an algorithm, the long division we were taught at primary school is an algorithm, and so too are the emergency landing checklists a pilot reads aloud after an engine failure. Then Alan Turing arrived in the nineteen-thirties, working not far from where some of these articles are now being read, to demonstrate how an algorithm could be executed by a machine, and the term began circulating in the computing world. So far so good, it was still a technical term with a precise meaning. The problem began in the twenty-tens when "the algorithm" became the generic name for any computational system that decides something on our behalf, from the Instagram feed to the Netflix recommendation engine. Today "the algorithm" has become a mystical entity, a kind of anonymous technological deity to which one ascribes blame and praise, while what we call "the TikTok algorithm" is not an algorithm but a stack of dozens of probabilistic models trained on billions of behavioural data points, with weights continuously calibrated by teams of human engineers who make specific design decisions. Calling all this "the algorithm" is convenient for designers because it hides the human responsibility behind a mathematical and sacral-sounding term. When a creator complains that "the algorithm is not showing my posts", they are using a phrase that means "the people who work at that company have decided not to show my posts", except that the first formulation sounds neutral and the second accusatory.

Mindfulness, finally, is the boldest theft of the four because it comes from a religious-soteriological context that has nothing to do with the context in which it is sold today. The term translates the Pali word sati, conscious attention, which in Theravada Buddhism is one of the eight components of the Noble Eightfold Path, a practice path oriented toward liberation from suffering. Sati is not an isolated technique but an element of a wider system that includes ethical precepts, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right concentration. Uprooted from that context, sati becomes something else, a pure technique of attentional self-regulation. Jon Kabat-Zinn, an MIT-trained molecular biologist with Zen formation, performed precisely this operation when in 1979 he launched at the University of Massachusetts Medical School the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programme, deliberately secularising the practice to make it acceptable in hospital clinical settings. A legitimate translation operation, incidentally, because Kabat-Zinn knew exactly what he was doing, was familiar with the Buddhist roots, and explicitly declared that his was a derived practice. The problem came afterwards, when the corporate wellness industry took that already simplified practice and simplified it further until it became an app on the phone that makes you breathe for five minutes before a meeting. In the United Kingdom this trajectory reached an almost parodic culmination when the NHS began prescribing mindfulness as a treatment for moderate depression, the Department for Education funded mindfulness programmes in schools, and a cross-party Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group was established at Westminster. The distance between Pali sati, clinical MBSR and corporate or parliamentary mindfulness is the same that runs between a fine Burgundy, a decent table wine, and a sugary canned drink labelled "wine flavour", all three of which appear under the word wine in some advertisement but are not the same thing.

There is something that ties the four cases together and is worth naming, and it is that all four of these semantic thefts have a precise direction, namely they shift responsibility from the system to the individual. Resilience asks the worker to endure, not the system to refrain from breaking him. Synergy asks the departments to cooperate more, not the management to organise better. The algorithm makes the decisions, not the engineers who designed it. Mindfulness asks you to relax better, not the workplace to be less stressful. They are words that appear descriptive and are in fact prescriptive, appear technical and are in fact moral, appear objective and are in fact political. Let us say it plainly, they are rhetorical instruments dressed up as scientific concepts. The next time someone presents one to you in a meeting with a serious face, it is worth remembering that they are probably asking you to do something you would rather not do, using a technical word to disguise the nature of the request.

Sunday morning and already in a polemical mood, I know, but there is something honest about a word that does what it says, and something deeply dishonest about a word that says one thing in order to do another. Perhaps the small culturally useful gesture, from time to time, is to return to words their original meaning, if only to notice how often we are being asked something other than what we are told we are being asked.