Even in traditional offices, “the lingua franca of corporate America has gotten much more emotional and much more right-brained than it was 20 years ago,” said Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn. She started spinning off examples. “If you and I parachuted back to Fortune 500 companies in 1990, we would see much less frequent use of terms like journey, mission, passion. There were goals, there were strategies, there were objectives, but we didn’t talk about energy; we didn’t talk about passion.”

    Koehn pointed out that this new era of corporate vocabulary is very “team”-oriented—and not by coincidence. “Let’s not forget sports—in male-dominated corporate America, it’s still a big deal. It’s not explicitly conscious; it’s the idea that I’m a coach, and you’re my team, and we’re in this together. There are lots and lots of CEOs in very different companies, but most think of themselves as coaches and this is their team and they want to win.”

These terms are also intended to infuse work with meaning—and, as Rakesh Khurana, another professor, points out, increase allegiance to the firm. “You have the importation of terminology that historically used to be associated with non-profit organizations and religious organizations: terms like vision, values, passion, and purpose,” said Khurana.

    This new focus on personal fulfillment can help keep employees motivated amid increasingly loud debates over work-life balance. The “mommy wars” of the 1990s are still going on today, prompting arguments about why women still can’t have it all and books like Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, whose title has become a buzzword in its own right. Terms like unplug, offline, life-hack, bandwidth, and capacity are all about setting boundaries between the office and the home. But if your work is your “passion,” you’ll be more likely to devote yourself to it, even if that means going home for dinner and then working long after the kids are in bed.

    But this seems to be the irony of office speak: Everyone makes fun of it, but managers love it, companies depend on it, and regular people willingly absorb it. As a linguist once said, “You can get people to think it’s nonsense at the same time that you buy into it.” In a workplace that’s fundamentally indifferent to your life and its meaning, office speak can help you figure out how you relate to your work—and how your work defines who you are.

答案精析：根据“Team”-oriented corporate vocabulary可定位至原文第二段首句。该句指出，新时代的企业词汇是以“团队”为导向的，而且这并非偶然。之后用体育运动的例子来说明教练和团队堪比如今企业中的老板和员工，认为公司就像是一支体育团队。所以“团队”导向的企业词汇与运动文化相关，故正确答案为C。

错项排除：A项中的incidents是对原文by coincidence作干扰，但要注意A项的historical incidents是指“历史事件”，而by coincidence表示“偶然”，二者意思有很大不同，故A项错误。原文中的male-dominated是在说美国企业以男性为主导，但并没有提到有关女性的信息，也并没有说到性别差异的问题，故B项错误。原文中出现的体育人员的职位是为了和如今企业中老板及员工的角色进行类比，它们和企业词汇并没有什么关联，故D项错误。