Stop for a second, if you have bandwidth, because there's a word we'd like to flag: synergy.
It sounds like it means something good, but it's unclear exactly what. It's something your bosses might say. There's pretty much a 0% chance you've said "synergy" in casual conversation.
"It's the ultimate buzzword. It's the one that everybody thinks of when they think of business jargon," says Erica Brozovsky, a sociolinguist who hosts the PBS series Otherwords.
But put a pin in that for a second, and we'll circle back on the corporate speak. For this edition of Word of the Week, we're doing a deep dive on synergy.
It starts with religion
Synergy comes from Greek: syn, a prefix for "together," and ergon, meaning "work."
These days, according to Merriam-Webster, it can refer to "combined action or operation" or, ahem, "a mutually advantageous conjunction or compatibility of distinct business participants or elements (such as resources or efforts)."
In many contexts, it means the whole of something being greater than the sum of its parts. For example, two people working together can achieve more than two people working separately.
The earliest recorded uses of the word come from religion, says Jess Zafarris, the author of etymology books including Useless Etymology.
"There are several New Testament books that were written in Greek by the Apostle Paul that contain the Greek word synergoi. And depending on the version, it's typically translated into English as 'fellow workers' or 'laborers together,' people who work synergistically," she says.
In the 1600s, synergy comes into play in Christian disputes.
The Church of England was engaged in pamphlet wars — debates through writings — with Presbyterians and Puritans, says Douglas Harper, founder and editor on Etymonline.com, an etymology dictionary.
"One of the things they're fighting about is whether salvation comes from God's grace or man's will. And some people naturally would compromise and say, well, 'it's both. They work together.' … And they called it 'synergism.'"
The word pops up again in medicine in the 1840s. The German physician and pathologist Friedrich Gustav Jacob Henle used it to describe the situation where "you do something to an organ and it makes another organ also do something good," Harper says, as opposed to antagonism, where an organ causes an opposite change in another organ.
Zafarris says the word also appeared in toxicology in the 1800s, to describe "when compounds work together to produce a more powerful effect than they would separately."
Skip ahead to the middle of the 20th century and the word starts to appear in other scientific and philosophical contexts: psychologist Raymond Cattell writes about synergy in groups, describing it in the 1957 book Personality and Motivation Structure and Measurement as "the total interest strength which goes into the activity and life of a group."
The public intellectual Buckminster Fuller, known for his architectural work popularizing geodesic domes, wrote two volumes of a book called Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, that were first published in the 1970s. Fuller's hard-to-understand field has been described as "the systematic study of space."
Ideating synergy
These uses of "synergy" already sound very dense and boring — and it gets worse.
Enter corporate America.
Igor Ansoff, who was known for developing ideas on business management, devoted a whole chapter of his 1965 book Corporate Strategy to synergy.
"In business literature it is frequently described as the '2 + 2 = 5' effect to denote the fact that the firm seeks a product-market posture with a combined performance that is greater than the sum of its parts," he wrote.
Use of the word grew in the business world in the coming decades.
"Synergy became this corporate buzzword in the '80s and '90s with all these business mergers and acquisitions like, 'we're better together' and 'we can do more,' you know, and eventually became overused," says Brozovsky.
Chances are you've seen "synergy" in a PowerPoint somewhere. Google "synergy" and you'll find lots of businesses still using the word in their name or products.
But "people don't really know what it means, because when you overuse something, the word loses its meaning," Brozovsky adds.
"It is the kind of word that can be slippery. It's got that basic sense of cooperation and making things better. But what does that really mean?" says Harper. "It's a short, snappy word that looks smart."
He adds: "It sounds like energy. It sounds like sympathy. It sounds like a lot of things that sound good. Ask people what they mean by it and I bet they couldn't tell you."
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