'Synergy' has a worse reputation than its polling. In YouGov's 2024 survey of 1,007 British business decision makers, 56% said they liked the word and 35% disliked it. That is a better score than 'touch base' at 49% to 43%, far better than 'circle back' at 42% to 47%, and roughly level with 'bandwidth' and 'granular'. The gap between reputation and result is mostly about who was asked. The people who mock synergy tend to be writing about business; the people rating it here run businesses, and for them the word is shorthand for a specific and testable claim: that two units combined will produce more than the sum of the parts, which is the stated justification for most mergers and most reorganisations. That is also why it attracts scorn from outside. The word is used loudest at the moment a combination is announced and almost never revisited when the promised gains fail to appear, so the people who hear it as a promise and the people who hear it as an excuse are both drawing on real experience.