fighting bull
If you don’t really understand what your colleagues are saying in meetings, you are not alone.
A survey of a thousand office workers in Britain by the firm of recruitment consultants Office Angels reported that two-thirds of office staff used unnecessary jargon terms, for the usual reasons of wanting to confuse opponents and seem superior. But 40% of those surveyed found it irritating and distracting, and 10% thought it made the most frequent users sound pretentious and untrustworthy. Here are just a few of the worst offenders:
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Low-hanging fruit, talk off-line, blue-sky idea, holistic approach, level playing field, sanity check, put to bed, whole nine yards, helicopter view, gap analysis, touch base, rain check, finger in the air, get in bed with, big picture, benchmark, ball park, seamless, ticks in all the right boxes, strategic fit, bread and butter. |
Some terms are odd and would stop almost anybody for a moment —low-hanging fruit, for a target that’s easy to reach, helicopter view, for an overview, and gap analysis, for assessing untapped opportunities. But several—such as level playing field, benchmark, and blue-sky—have been in British English for many years. And are strategic fit or bread and butter really so hard to work out, in context? It would seem so, from the survey.
But the survey shows that people are easily confused by the unfamiliar - good enough reason for sticking to clear language the rest of the time.
extract from "Just fuel for buzzword bingo?", Michael Quinion
