What corporate language does to events, products, and responsibility

Sometimes your job comes down to choosing one verb. You are not the customer reading the statement, the person complaining on social media, or the journalist who may quote it the next morning. You are somewhere inside the organization, where something has happened and a response has to be approved. Operations has its terminology, Legal wants accuracy, Communications wants clarity, executives want brevity, and several versions of the same sentence are open on the screen.

At that point, wording can easily look like the final stage of the process. The facts already exist; language merely has to package them appropriately. A sentence may sound too blunt, another too defensive, and someone proposes a term that seems more neutral. If everyone can live with it, the wording goes out.

There is a linguistic problem hidden in that apparently ordinary decision.

Who is doing what to whom?

In systemic-functional linguistics, transitivity is part of the way grammar represents experience. A clause construes a process, the participants involved in that process, and any relevant circumstances surrounding it.[1] The full system is considerably more detailed than this, but for the purposes of reviewing consequential wording, a useful first question is remarkably simple: who is doing what to whom?

Compare We cancelled the delivery, The delivery was cancelled, and You experienced a service disruption. The three sentences could be used in relation to the same underlying situation, but they do not represent it in the same way. In the first, the organization is explicitly responsible for an action. In the second, the cancellation remains but its agent disappears. In the third, the organization has vanished altogether; the customer has become the participant who experiences something, while an action has been reconceived as a disruption.

None of those transformations necessarily requires a grammatical falsehood. That is precisely why they matter. Grammar does more than place facts into sentences: it helps determine which participants are visible, what sort of process connects them, where agency appears, and what kind of event the reader is being asked to imagine. Questions of this kind are also well established in the study of business discourse, where linguistic analysis has been used specifically to examine how organizations represent agency and action.[2]

Every representation is selective, and no sentence can contain every aspect of an event. The useful question is therefore not whether a sentence represents reality completely, because it cannot. The question is whether the representation it selects remains compatible with the reality that the people receiving it know, experienced, or can see for themselves.

That distinction becomes considerably more important when the sentence is being issued in the name of an organization.

Re-accommodating a passenger

On April 9, 2017, United Express Flight 3411 was preparing to leave Chicago for Louisville. United president Scott Kirby later testified before the U.S. Senate that the flight had initially been overbooked by one passenger, but that issue had been resolved before boarding. According to Kirby, the situation involving Dr. David Dao arose because four crew members were placed on the aircraft after passengers had already boarded.[5]

When Dao did not leave the aircraft, Chicago Department of Aviation aviation security officers became involved. Chicago Aviation Commissioner Ginger Evans later testified that those officers departed from the department’s standard procedures and that force was intended only for situations in which it was necessary to protect passenger safety or security. She also clarified that the aviation security officers were not the airport’s designated law-enforcement authority. United, examining its own decisions, separately identified one of its failures as having called on law enforcement when no safety or security situation existed.[5]

The following day, United CEO Oscar Munoz issued a short public statement apologizing for having to “re-accommodate these customers.”[3] The expression quickly became notorious, but simply calling it a euphemism does not tell us very much about what went wrong. The more useful question for someone who might have had to approve it is what kind of event the verb asks the reader to construct.

To accommodate someone belongs naturally to the semantic world of service. A hotel accommodates a guest; an airline accommodates a passenger; a company accommodates a customer’s needs. Re-accommodate preserves that basic relationship. It presents the organization as performing a service-related process in relation to its customers, something roughly equivalent to making another arrangement for them.

The event that had created the crisis contained a different set of processes. A seated passenger was being required to leave; he did not do so; security officers became involved; and force was used. It would itself be inaccurate to collapse those distinctions and say simply that United employees physically removed Dao, because the people who used force were Chicago aviation security officers. Yet re-accommodate moves in the opposite direction: it selects the service dimension of the situation while leaving the refusal, escalation and forcible removal outside the representation.

This is where transitivity becomes useful to someone making a corporate decision. The question is not merely whether re-accommodate is defensible within an airline’s operational vocabulary. It is whether the process expressed by that verb can plausibly represent the event that the public statement is supposed to address.

There is an important difference between those two tests. A term may be entirely normal inside an organization because it belongs to the categories through which the organization manages its operations. That does not mean it will adequately represent the experience of the person on the other side of the transaction. Internal accuracy and external accuracy are not always the same thing.

United’s language changed markedly within a day. On April 11, Munoz referred instead to the customer who had been “forcibly removed,” said that no one should be treated that way, and stated that United took “full responsibility.”[4] The underlying event had not changed between the two statements. What changed was the linguistic representation through which the company chose to acknowledge it.

That contrast gives the person approving the first statement a much better question than Can we find a softer word than removed? The question worth asking is what process the sentence is actually naming and whether that process accounts for the event people are being asked to recognize. A more comfortable representation is not necessarily a more sustainable one.

Peel. Empty. Recycle.

The same problem can appear in a piece of advertising that seems far less dramatic. No passenger is being removed from an aircraft, no crisis statement is being prepared, and there may be nothing in the copy that immediately looks troublesome.

In July 2019, The Coast in Halifax published advertiser content developed and paid for by Keurig Canada. The piece repeatedly described recycling K-Cup pods as a simple process and ended with three instructions: “peel; empty; recycle. It’s that easy!”[6] The advertisement expressly stated that Halifax accepted coffee pods as part of its recycling program, so the point here is not to suggest that this particular Halifax claim was shown to be false. Its value for our purposes is different: it makes the linguistic structure of the message unusually easy to see.

At first sight, the wording is almost the opposite of United’s re-accommodate. Nothing appears to have been obscured grammatically. The copy is active, concise and clear, and the implied participant is easy to identify throughout the sequence: you peel, you empty, you recycle.

That is exactly what makes it interesting. The first two processes are actions that the consumer can complete directly: you can peel the lid and empty the coffee grounds. The third verb occupies the same grammatical position, but the conditions surrounding the process are different. A consumer can place a prepared pod into a recycling stream; whether the local program accepts that pod, and what preparation that program requires, are not matters determined by the consumer alone.

The grammar smooths over that difference. Peel, empty, recycle presents three processes in parallel and gives each the same implied Actor. Linguistically, the sequence feels like three successive actions under the consumer’s control even though the successful realization of the last one depends on conditions outside that individual action.

That distinction later became relevant to Keurig’s broader recyclability claims in Canada. In January 2022, the Competition Bureau announced that its investigation had concluded that Keurig Canada’s recyclability claims were false or misleading in areas where K-Cup pods were not accepted for recycling. At that time, the Bureau found that the pods were not widely accepted in municipal recycling programs outside British Columbia and Quebec. It also concluded that claims about preparation could be false or misleading in municipalities where local programs required additional steps beyond peeling the lid and emptying the grounds.[7] Keurig resolved the Bureau’s concerns through a consent agreement that included a $3 million penalty, changes to its claims and packaging, corrective notices and other measures.

Keurig’s corrective notice makes the interpretive problem still clearer. It tells Canadian consumers that K-Cup pods “may not be recyclable in your area” and reports the Bureau’s conclusion that the previous claims created the impression that the pods could be recycled in each municipality where those claims were made.[8]

Now the apparently simple adjective recyclable becomes worth examining as well. Some properties appear to belong to an object regardless of where the object happens to be: a pod has a particular shape, mass and material composition. But recyclable, in the practical sense relevant to a consumer deciding what to do with a used pod, can depend on a relationship among the object, the consumer and the recycling system available in that location.

That relationship can disappear inside one adjective. The material may be technically capable of being recycled; some facilities may be capable of processing it; a particular municipal program may accept it; or a purchaser may reasonably understand the label to mean that the product can be put into the recycling stream available where that purchaser lives. These propositions are related, but they are not interchangeable.

The same is true of It’s that easy! The phrase does not add another step to the process; it evaluates the process that has just been represented. The consumer has not merely been told what to do but has been told how to understand the sequence: it is straightforward, uncomplicated and achievable. That evaluation can work perfectly well where the local system accepts the product under the stated conditions, but it becomes much harder to sustain when the final process depends upon requirements not contained in the instruction itself.

For the person approving a claim, this creates a question different from the one raised by United: are we describing a property of our product, or a relationship between our product and a system that the customer may or may not have access to? Closely related is another question: are we representing an outcome as something the customer can accomplish when the customer controls only part of the process?

These questions do not establish that every use of recyclable is misleading, nor do they prescribe in advance what wording must be used. They do something more useful before publication: they expose assumptions compressed inside apparently ordinary language so that those assumptions can be tested against the conditions in which the statement will actually be interpreted.

Canadian deceptive-marketing law makes that distinction particularly relevant. The Competition Bureau’s current guidance explains that the assessment of a representation includes its general impression as well as its literal meaning, and specifically notes that an environmental claim can be literally true while still producing a misleading overall impression.[9] From a linguistic perspective, the parallel is clear: defending individual words in isolation is not the same as accounting for the proposition their combination encourages the audience to construct.

Keurig therefore presents a different problem from United, but not a weaker one. United invites us to ask whether the verb adequately represents what happened; Keurig invites us to examine who appears capable of completing a process and whether a relationship with the outside world has been compressed into what looks like a simple property of a product. Both questions could have been asked while the wording was still on the screen.

How much can an adjective promise?

Volkswagen provides a harder limit case. According to the Federal Trade Commission’s amended complaint, from late 2008 through late 2015 Volkswagen USA marketed more than 550,000 Volkswagen- and Audi-branded diesel vehicles affected by defeat-device software while representing them as having low emissions, complying with emissions standards and being environmentally friendly.[10] The campaign repeatedly used the expression Clean Diesel, and the FTC cited Volkswagen USA marketing-strategy materials in which one of the intended messages attached to clean was a claimed 95 percent reduction in NOx emissions.

The adjective clean illustrates how much representational work a small word can perform. Vehicle emissions involve different pollutants, quantities, standards, testing conditions and comparisons. Clean compresses that technical complexity into an apparently simple evaluation. It does not specify exactly how clean, compared with what, under which operating conditions, or according to which measurement, yet it offers the consumer an immediately accessible conclusion about environmental performance.

The FTC complaint itself is an allegation, and it is important not to treat every assertion within it as though it were independently adjudicated fact. There is, however, separate evidence about the underlying conduct. In Canada, the Competition Bureau concluded that Volkswagen Canada and Audi Canada had misled consumers by promoting affected 2.0-litre diesel vehicles as having clean diesel engines with reduced emissions that were cleaner than an equivalent gasoline engine; the companies entered into a consent agreement carrying a $15 million penalty.[11] In the United States, Volkswagen AG subsequently pleaded guilty in federal court to three felony counts connected with a scheme to sell diesel vehicles containing software designed to cheat U.S. emissions tests.[12]

That distinction gives Volkswagen a different role in the discussion. Better linguistic analysis cannot always produce better wording, because sometimes the problem lies not in the wording but in the relationship between the desired message and the available evidence. If those facts do not support the proposition an organization wants customers to draw, the task is no longer to search for an adjective that communicates the same impression more safely.

At that point, the appropriate wording decision may be that the claim should not be made. This is an important boundary because linguistic review should not become a method for disguising inconvenient realities more effectively. Its value lies in testing whether the representation being considered can be defended against those realities before the representation is released.

Before the sentence leaves the room

Return now to the draft on the screen. One version sounds defensive, another sounds alarming, and a third uses terminology that everyone inside the organization recognizes immediately. Someone suggests softening a verb; someone else prefers a cleaner adjective; Legal may be checking whether every individual statement can be defended literally.

At that stage, it is useful to ask questions that come before style. Who appears as an Actor in the sentence, and who has disappeared? What process have we chosen to describe what happened? Are we assigning someone the ability to produce an outcome that actually depends on other participants or circumstances? Are we presenting a relationship as though it were an intrinsic property? Does an adjective compress several factual propositions into an evaluation that the evidence may not support?

None of this means that organizations should describe every adverse event in the harshest possible terms. They have legitimate reasons to be precise, cautious and proportionate, and responsible linguistic analysis does not require every sentence to contain every causal detail or every possible attribution of responsibility. Selection is inevitable; the question is whether the selection leaves a representation that can still coexist with the relevant evidence.

This becomes especially important when the people receiving the message already have access to that evidence. A passenger who has been physically removed from an aircraft does not experience the event differently because an organization’s vocabulary represents what followed as re-accommodation. A consumer’s local recycling options do not change because three parallel imperatives make every stage of a process appear equally available. A technically complex environmental performance does not acquire the properties suggested by clean merely because the adjective is simple and persuasive.

The same principle applies well beyond these examples. A customer’s loss does not become a gain because compensation is called a reward, and an adverse outcome does not become less adverse because an internal system calls it an adjustment. Language may legitimately select a perspective on reality, but changing the representation does not change the referent against which that representation will eventually be tested.

That is why, before consequential wording is approved, Does this sound better? may be one of the least useful questions in the room. A more useful question is: What reality does this sentence ask the reader to accept, and can that representation survive contact with the evidence? When the answer matters to customers, regulators, courts, employees or the public, linguistic analysis is not cosmetic work performed after the important decisions have been made. It is part of the decision itself.

Daniel Avilán

References

1. Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2014). Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar (4th ed.). Routledge.
2. Darics, E., & Koller, V. (2019). “Social Actors ‘to Go’: An Analytical Toolkit to Explore Agency in Business Discourse and Communication.” Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, 82(2), 214–238. DOI: 10.1177/2329490619828367.
3. United Airlines. (2017, April 10). “Response to United Express Flight 3411.” United Newsroom.
4. United Airlines. (2017, April 11). “Statement from United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz on United Express Flight 3411.” United Newsroom.
5. U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Subcommittee on Aviation Operations, Safety, and Security. (2017, May 4). Questions, Answers, and Perspectives on the Current State of Airline Travel, S. Hrg. 115-154. Testimony of Ginger Evans and Scott Kirby.
6. Keurig Canada Inc. (2019, July 4). “Why recycling properly is key.” Advertiser content published in The Coast.
7. Competition Bureau Canada. (2022, January 6). “Keurig Canada to pay $3 million penalty to settle Competition Bureau’s concerns over coffee pod recycling claims.”
8. Keurig Canada Inc. “Notice by Keurig Canada Inc. Regarding Recyclability of K-Cup Pods.” Corrective notice issued pursuant to the Competition Bureau settlement.
9. Competition Bureau Canada. (2026). “Environmental claims and greenwashing” and “Environmental claims and the Competition Act.” Competition Bureau guidance.
10. Federal Trade Commission. (2017, January 31). FTC’s Amended Complaint in FTC v. Volkswagen Group of America, In re Volkswagen “Clean Diesel” Marketing, Sales Practices & Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 2672.
11. Competition Bureau Canada. (2016, December 19). “Volkswagen and Audi to pay up to $2.1 billion to consumers and $15 million penalty for environmental marketing claims.”
12. U.S. Department of Justice. (2017, March 10). “Volkswagen AG Pleads Guilty in Connection with Conspiracy to Cheat U.S. Emissions Tests.”