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6 Office Jargon Phrases You Need To Stop Using Now!

Glassdoor Team

Glassdoor Team

Glassdoor Team | Author & Career Expert at Glassdoor | 26 July 2017

There are many things that will change when you take your first tentative steps on the corporate ladder; you will have a strict timeline, you will become entrenched in office politics, but of all the challenges you will face when starting a job, surely the most painful, the most confusing is business jargon. Also known as buzzwords, these words will pepper the speech of your manager – and you will simply stare and wonder what on earth they are actually talking about. So this blog is for all of you who are sat at your desk with your head in your hands wondering why you can’t just have an open, honest discussion in the workplace instead of all this nonsense.
  1.      Punch a puppy
Why? Just why? Why would anyone think this is an appropriate thing to say in the office place – surely there is no one on this planet who could/would/should ever punch a puppy. Why would you think is an appropriate analogy to describe doing something bad for the greater good? 
  1.      Thought shower
What your colleague actually means is that they would like you to come up with a number of different ideas, but that is not what they said. What they instructed you to do was to take a thought shower – which just makes no actual sense and is a rather confusing thing to say.
  1.      Let’s take it offline
This basically means you are in a team meeting and you (or a colleague) has brought up something that rattles the cage of another, or put more simply person A pisses off person B. But, instead of dealing with this like an adult – they resort to business jargon and instead use a phrase that is sure to provoke toe curling and eye rolling – “let’s take it offline.”
  1.      Bandwidth
In a business context when a person says the word bandwidth they actually mean capacity or limit, but for some unknown reason they seem to think that bandwidth makes them sound more professional/more intelligent/more senior – lord only knows why. All we know that it’s mightily annoying – the English language is full of vocabulary and we would rather stick to using words in their appropriate contexts.
  1.      We’re on a journey
Are we? Really? This is quite possibly one of the most pretentious phrases ever uttered – and really is used to make a project sound more glamorous or exciting than it is. A journey is a trip from Gatwick to Marbella on your friend’s stag, it is not a two week project that has dragged out for two months….Although we wouldn’t tell your boss that, he probably won’t like it.
  1.      Square the circle
You don’t need a degree in architecture to know that you physically can’t square a circle – it is literally asking us to defy the laws of nature and perform the impossible. Let’s all just stop saying this please.
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Glassdoor Team

Glassdoor Team

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