My colleague called another worker ‘toxic’. What did they mean?

I’m hearing the word “toxic” used more frequently at work. When I first came across it, I thought I had a rough idea of what it meant, but now I hear it used in a range of different contexts, and the meaning seems elusive.

Not long ago, a colleague used it to describe another colleague. I would say the person they were describing is headstrong and sometimes prickly, and I was curious to know what they meant by “toxic” – whether it was a special kind of unpleasant or something even worse. Their answer was defensive and rude. Perhaps you can enlighten me.

“Toxic” has had quite the linguistic adventure over a long time. If you go all the way back to one of its roots from ancient Greek, you find a word referring to archery – and poisoned arrows.

Fast-forward a few millennia, and you find a word used in workplaces (and to refer to relationships and even people) to mean, well, almost anything with a negative hue.

Like many words we use at work today, “toxic” in the broader, non-scientific sense, began its move into the vernacular when it was employed by psychologists and then, crucially, self-help authors. For a few years, it had a highly specific metaphorical meaning.

A psychoanalyst by the name of Marie Coleman needed a word to describe a very particular concept she was outlining. She borrowed “toxic” from the hard and applied sciences.

Toxic, unfortunately, is one of those words that has now come to mean whatever a person wants it to mean.

In the decades that followed, psychologists borrowed it, and the semantic shift really started to gain momentum when it was employed outside academic journals, and in publications written for a mass audience.

A very successful book in the late 1980s, Toxic Parents, used the word to describe parents whose actions affected their child into adulthood. In the mid-1990s another hugely popular book, Toxic People, offered this remarkably expansive definition, including “narcissists”, “control freaks” and “wimps”.

You mentioned that you find the word elusive, and I think part of the reason it seems so slippery today is that by the time the new use of the word was presented to punters, it was already amorphous.

It’s impossible to know exactly why some words catch on and others don’t, but the evocative nature of the metaphor is probably a good starting point.

Also, once it had broken free of Coleman’s narrow definition, it expressed something that existing words in the areas of psychology and work perhaps didn’t. “Dysfunctional”, “hostile”, “cutthroat”, “counterproductive” and “unprofessional” didn’t quite convey the concept of a spreading malignancy. “Cancer” or “cancerous” did, but those words have a distinctly different connotation to “toxic”.

I can’t say exactly when it started to achieve ubiquity, but I, like you, have noticed it used by friends, colleagues and acquaintances over the past 10 years. In fact, Oxford Dictionaries made “toxic” its word of the year in 2018. Importantly, by then, it had begun to shift away from a purely figurative concept.

Before it was carried into the social sciences, it was very frequently used literally. We said a frog’s poison was not like a toxin, but was toxic. The same with nuclear waste and lead paint. Now we’ve started saying that a person is toxic.

This makes the description more pointed. I think that’s what you experienced in your workplace. When one colleague referred to another that way, it didn’t seem to you like a poetic comparison; it seemed like they were making a discrete and penetrating claim.

And yet, it was left at that. There was no elaboration.

I said before that the word is evocative, but perhaps provocative is the better adjective. It’s vigorous but not vivid. I feel many people employ it because it’s emotive. A stronger word than “problematic” or “inappropriate” or “challenging”. Stronger but not clearer. Which is why you quietly asked if they would enlarge on their assertion.

Toxic, unfortunately, is one of those words that has now come to mean whatever a person wants it to mean: everything from a virulent social contagion to a minor administrative annoyance.

It can also, like so many corporate buzzwords, have little or no meaning behind it. Instead, it works as part of a social performance – “Look at me, I can use the latest trend in language”.

We can’t know for sure in what way your colleague was using the word. But if I had to guess, I’d lean towards that final option. Their rude defensiveness in response might, then, have been a tacit admission that they didn’t really know what they meant.

Send your questions through to Work Therapy by emailing jonathan@theinkbureau.com.au

Get workplace news, advice and perspectives to help make your job work for you. Sign up for our weekly Thank God it’s Monday newsletter.