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Lean In可定位至原文第四段第二句。该句提到，上世纪九十年代的“妈妈大战”仍在继续，引发了人们对女性为何不能兼顾工作和生活的争论，以及《向前一步》这类书籍的兴起。该句中的have it all指的是前一句中的work-life balance，也就是说Lean In一书的内容和职业女性为什么不能做到平衡工作和生活相关，所以这本书是在为职业女性代言，故正确答案为A。

错项排除：第四段最后一句出现了passion，作为B项内容的干扰词，但此处的passion和Lean In这本书的内容并没有关系，此处在说如果你对你的工作很有激情，你就更有可能全身心地投入到工作中去，故B项错误。该段第二句mommy wars是对C项内容的干扰，但是此处的“妈妈大战”是促使Lean In等书的出版，并非是这本书引发了“妈妈大战”，C项颠倒了因果关系，故C项错误。第四段首句keep employees motivated是对D项内容的干扰，该句在说这些关注个人成就的企业词语会激励员工，并非指表扬有积极性的员工，而且D项内容和Lean In一书没有关联，故排除D项。

长难句分析：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.

本句主干为The “mommy wars” of the 1990s are still going on…，主谓结构，today作时间状语。后面prompting至句末为现在分词作结果状语，该状语中arguments和books为prompting的并列宾语。句末的whose引导定语从句，修饰Lean In，用于对此书做进一步的解释说明。

句意为：上世纪九十年代的“妈妈大战”仍在继续，引发了人们对女性为何不能兼得两者的争论，同时也推动了谢丽尔•桑德伯格的《向前一步》等书的兴起，该书的书名本身已经成为了一个流行语。