Introduction
When it comes to business jargon, managers love to use it. Pippa and Phil talk about some of the strangest business jargon phrases and where they come from, with the help of Professor Anne Curzan from the University of Michigan.
Vocabulary
micromanaging
trying to control every small part of a task that somebody else is supposed to be doing
like herding cats
used to describe a difficult or complicated task, usually to do with organising lots of people
get your ducks in a row
get everything organised and ready to go
learnings
lessons
put our shoulders to the wheel
work hard
get your head down
work hard
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.
Pippa
Today we’re talking about business jargon.
Phil
The world of work is full of strange phrases and metaphors and we have some great ones to talk about today.
Pippa
That’s right. In today’s episode, we’re looking at some jargon we use when talking about the organisation that goes on in the workplace. Phil, have you noticed that people like to use jargon when they’re talking about organising at work?
Phil
Yes, definitely and lots of work is about managing people so managers often use corporate jargon to talk about concepts related to that.
Pippa
Yeah and we’ve talked before in the programme about how people find corporate jargon sometimes confusing or annoying. Interestingly, a survey of UK business leaders found that they actually liked using work jargon. They found those phrases useful rather than annoying.
Phil
There’s also a lot of jargon around management styles. Micromanaging is a word used often at work and it’s used, often negatively, to describe someone who wants to control every small part of a task. Who won’t let someone else help or get on with the job.
Pippa
A lot of the phrases used to describe organising things and people are quite strange and don’t make that much sense. So, I spoke to Anne Curzan, who is a Professor of English language at the University of Michigan, about a few of them.
Anne Curzan
We have a couple of slangy phrases that involve animals. We have ducks in a row. We have herding cats.
Pippa
You might have heard someone saying, herding cats at work. You could say organising a team was like herding cats, Phil.
Phil
Yes, and well, herding, that comes from the verb herd, which means to make a group of animals like sheep move together. Now, sheep, you can herd sheep if you know what you’re doing, but try doing that with cats! I don’t think that would work. I think that would be quite difficult.
Pippa
Yeah, quite chaotic! And Anne says it’s become a very common metaphor.
Anne Curzan
This refers to trying to do something that is unwieldy or unfeasible. Particularly if you’re trying to get a group of people, who may not want to be organised because they think they are free agents, to get them all to do something. And this is one that I feel like this is new within my lifetime. And it looks like it is. We certainly have evidence for this by the 1980s. And it has risen pretty rapidly in the last 25 years.
Phil
OK. And the other animal phrase Anne mentioned was ducks in a row. Where did that come from?
Pippa
Yeah. So if someone tells you to get your ducks in a row, they mean to get things organised and ready to go. And there are a few theories about why we say this.
Anne Curzan
There are some theories that it comes from the game of pool. That seems unlikely. Is it about hunting real ducks or shooting mechanical ducks? It’s possible. But Michael Quinion on World Wide Words I think persuasively provides some evidence that this may just be related to descriptions of a mother duck with her ducklings organised in a row behind her.
Pippa
You can imagine a duck with her baby ducks, her ducklings, walking behind her kind of like a manager at work getting everyone to follow them and do what they say, I guess.
Phil
That’s a very cute image. I’m trying to imagine our team following our managers around.
Pippa
Ah, yeah. Like little ducklings!
Phil
Yeah it feels like there’s a lot of metaphorical language here.
Pippa
Yeah. It’s fun to try and work out why we say these things. Where did these strange metaphors come from?
Phil
Yeah they’re a bit like idioms, aren’t they? I mean, we have this in other areas of English. But we know that some people can find them annoying at work. They think these phrases are overused or cliche, which means something that’s been said lots of times before, so it’s… it’s not surprising or interesting at all, really.
Pippa
Yeah. And if you’re interested in learning more idioms for other parts of your life, not just work, you could try our podcast Learning English Conversations where we have a programme that has a different idiom, or a different phrase, each week.
Phil
Let’s have some more jargon examples. With our colleagues at Business Daily, who make programmes about work for the BBC World Service, we asked what jargon you hear all the time at work.
Pippa
One that got mentioned a few times was learnings. So when a manager talks about your learnings from a meeting, rather than lessons. People said that was quite annoying.
Phil
And another one that you might hear when someone is asking you to work hard. Let’s put our shoulders to the wheel. We have a similar phrase, get your head down. It just means get on and work hard.
Pippa
Heard a phrase at work that you don’t understand? Email us at learning.english@bbc.co.uk and we could read out and explain your phrase in this podcast.
Phil
Thanks for listening to learning English for work. We’ll be back next time to explore some more strange business phrases. Until then, find more help with your English at work on our website: bbclearningenglish.com.
Pippa
Bye for now.
Phil
Bye.