Jargon is an annoying aspect of work, but more interesting than the irritation factor is some recent research on who reaches for buzzwords...
A study published in Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes under the title "Compensatory conspicuous communication" analysed tens of thousands of academic dissertation titles and found that authors from lower-status institutions used markedly more jargon than those from prestigious ones.
Experimental follow-ups have reproduced this: in interviews, if people think they are the underdog their language gets denser...
Jargon is conspicuous consumption for people who cannot afford the watch
The middle manager saying "let's circle back and socialise this offline" is not being lazy. He is doing unpaid reputational labour, in a firm that has given him no other way to demonstrate that he belongs in the room.
According to research by Shane Littrell those who lose corporate twaddle are worse at their jobs.
What Littrell built was a receptivity scale: he generated semantically empty statements by remixing real Fortune 500 executive language, then asked more than a thousand workers to rate how much business insight each conveyed. Those who found the empty statements impressive scored worse on analytical reasoning and workplace decision-making — and were also more likely to produce such language themselves.
So the finding is about being taken in, not merely about talking that way. That distinction matters. Plenty of sharp people deploy this stuff cynically, knowing precisely how hollow it is, because the alternative is being the only person in the meeting speaking plainly. The damage is done by the believers, and Littrell's point is that workplaces structurally protecting the habit — reward it, and it propagates.
Final thoughts
Purging the vocabulary would achieve very little. The words are downstream of an economy in which most people have insecure standing and few reliable ways to prove their worth, so they signal it instead.
Fix the insecurity and the synergy dies on its own. Until then, expect more circling back.