Introduction
The language of the workplace can be very confusing. Pippa and Phil talk about business jargon and some of the strange phrases people use at work. They also hear from John Fiset from the University of Nova Scotia about why jargon can make it difficult to get work done.
Vocabulary
end of play
the end of the working day
boil the ocean
try to solve a problem in an ambitious or complicated way
eat the elephant
take on a big task, rather than breaking it up into smaller tasks
a lot of moving parts
a complicated situation where lots of things need to work together
Transcript
Note: This is a transcript of a spoken conversation and is not a word-for-word script.
Pippa
Hello and welcome to Learning English for Work, I’m Pippa.
Phil
And I’m Phil. In this podcast, we talk about how you can improve your English in the workplace. And today, we’re talking about a big part of work life, business jargon.
Now, jargon is what we call words and phrases used by a group of people, like a team in an office, that not everyone understands.
Pippa
Yeah so think about acronyms, or phrases and shortenings. Words that you use at work that if you were to say them at home, people would say ‘what are you talking about!?’
Phil
Yeah, that’s right. You may have experienced this, you start a new job, and everyone’s using strange words and phrases and you have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s probably not a problem with your English, it’s all jargon!
Pippa
Yeah, when I started at BBC Learning English I had that exact problem. You guys had different acronyms for programme names and lots of processes that I didn’t know about and it took me ages to understand what everyone was talking about.
Phil
We teamed up with our colleagues at Business Daily, who make programmes about the world of business for the World Service, to try and understand why we use so much jargon at work and whether it’s useful.
Pippa
Their reporter Ed Butler spoke to some office workers in London to understand more.
Ed Butler
So I come now to the heart of the City of London, right by St Paul’s Cathedral. Around me are people in suits and ties, having a quick coffee break between, no doubt, huge deals. I’m going to find out how they feel about jargon.
Worker 1
I hate it! All the acronyms, all the things, like, oh everyone talks in metaphors that I don’t understand.
Worker 2
Yeah, I love it. Love using them.
Ed Butler
Really?
Worker 2
Sound more important, don’t you?
Worker 3
Yeah! Sound like you know what you’re doing!
Ed Butler
How do you feel about it?
Worker 4
I guess, initially, it can be a bit alienating, because you do not know what people are talking about. But after a while it’s kind of nice, I guess, because you feel like you belong to that group where everybody is speaking the same language, in some sense.
So, yeah. I think it’s quite alright and it usually cuts down on having to see out the full word. It’s just quicker, sometimes, more efficient.
Phil
OK, it seems like people can’t agree about whether jargon is good or bad, but lots of them use it. So let’s talk about some examples. Pippa, is there any jargon you hear all the time?
Pippa
Yeah, one that I hear quite a lot is people will say something like, can you get that to me by end of play. And so end of play would mean the end of the working day, maybe five pm, but it’s a bit confusing, end of play.
Phil
I think it’s from cricket that one, isn’t it?
Pippa
Is it? A lot of them are sports metaphors which I don’t like because I don’t like sports.
Phil
There’s one that you told me about, boil the ocean. I’m not so familiar with that one. Could you tell me what that means?
Pippa
Yeah, so boil the ocean is a phrase that we use to talk about an ambitious approach to solving a problem. So, the idea is that you’re doing a lot of work to achieve a very small thing. So if you wanted to boil the ocean, you’d need a lot of effort. And people will sometimes say, let’s not boil the ocean. So, let’s not put too much effort in just to achieve a very small thing.
Phil
I’d heard a similar one. Let’s not eat the elephant all at once, saying that you should break down a big task like eating an elephant into small parts and just do a small thing first, then the next thing.
Pippa
Are there any business phrases like this that you like, Phil?
Phil
Yes, actually, there’s one I really like because I think it describes something in quite a short way and it describes something complicated. We might talk about a project or something we’re working on us having a lot of moving parts like some great big clockwork thing. And I really like that idea. It just means that there’s lots of things that are happening that have to be coordinated to work together. So you have to be careful when you change one thing, that it has an effect on lots of other things that are connected.
Pippa
Yeah, I use that. So, if someone’s asking you know how a project’s going, I might say it’s got a lot of moving parts and I am therefore saying it’s very complicated, I’m maybe a little bit stressed about it and hoping everything comes together and works well.
We would love to hear which phrases drive you mad at work, or about any jargon that you’d like to understand better. Email us at learning.english@bbc.co.uk and tell us the business jargon you’d like us to talk about.
Phil
Now, learning about some of these strange phrases can be fun. But it’s also complicated. You mentioned, Pippa, that when you started working here that you didn’t always understand what we were talking about.
Pippa
Yeah, so when I started at Learning English, I didn’t understand some of the jargon. And that can be strange because when you use these phrases you have a sense of belonging, but if you don’t understand them, then you can feel a little bit left out. And there was actually a study by LinkedIn and Duolingo which found that a lot of people who speak English as a second language found that work chat
made them feel quite isolated, they struggled to kind of learn all these different phrases that people were using all the time.
And I spoke to John Fiset, who is an expert in workplace culture and language at the University of Novia Scotia in Canada to learn more about the impacts of business jargon.
John Fiset
You have just cases where you may understand only half of what was said, you’re being asked to do a project, you didn’t really get some of the terms and you didn’t do a great job on it.
Pippa
If someone is using jargon that not everyone understands it can be awkward, but it can also slow things down.
John Fiset
You may feel very confident that you understand what is happening. And that… that’s the sinister part of all of this. You may completely believe that you are fully understanding what’s being said. But one or two key words can, like, make it the opposite of what you expected. So you provide a document based on what you thought, but it’s the opposite.
Phil
Love it or hate it, business jargon is everywhere in international workplaces. And we’re making a series all about jargon phrases, what they mean and how best to use them. Send us any phrases you’d like us to talk about to learning.english@bbc.co.uk.
Pippa
And if you want to learn more about business jargon, you can hear the full programme we made with Business Daily in their podcast feed. Search ‘Business Daily’ in your podcast app or follow the link in the notes to this programme.
Phil
Thanks for listening, bye for now!
Pippa
Bye!