When language has a financial meltdown

Touch base? Core competency? Scalable? Such financial jargon must be stopped before we all turn into rockstars, writes John Daly. The person who uses such terminology was likely putting on ‘Gangnam Style’ at the office Christmas party.

Are you fully up to speed on what it means to shift a paradigm, leverage a best practice, or join a tiger team? If not, welcome to the club where the majority of us find ourselves increasingly confused by utterances from the financial community.

Money is the common language of the world, yet very few of us grasp its grammar and syntax. John Lanchester, in his latest book How To Speak Money, sets out to lift the veil shrouding the world of everyday economics, and, in particular, the industry jargon that seems to proliferate with every passing year. As the author of Capital and Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone And No One Can Pay, Lanchester knows his topic, and effectively decodes the daily nonsense of economic-speak with clarity and humour.

Working on the book since 2008, Lanchester said he “made it one of my ambitions for this book that it will make readers want to go and read more about money and economics”.

It may well be too lofty an ambition for a global population increasingly cynical about banks, bankers, and their closeness to governments, but it will, at least, act as a primer for much of the slang and jargon heard daily on financial channels.

With verbal flotsam such as ‘touch base’, ‘moving forward,’ ‘thinking outside the box’, ‘back of the net’, and ‘moving the goalposts’ now permanent fixtures in the management-speak dictionary, new creations crop up every year.

A few of the worst offenders of 2014 follow.

Core competency: Supposedly refers to a firm’s fundamental strength, and now appears with regular grammatical incorrectness in everything from interview questions to company balance sheets.

Drinking the Kool-Aid: Tasteless just about describes this phrase derived from the Jonestown Massacre of 1978, where the acolytes of Jim Jones blindly drank a fatal potion disguised by the familiar soft drink. Meaning to blindly accept something like a profit prediction or dubious company statement, this ill-judged statement has proven unexpectedly long-lived.

Scalable: A scalable business or activity supposedly needs minimum additional effort to increase its sales or global reach. A favourite comment of the venture capital community, it has become one of 2014’s more ubiquitous phrases to the point of persistent annoyance for the rest of us.

Over the wall: With connotations harking back to those daring PoW breaks in The Great Escape, this one usually attaches to a request from management to getting a document to clients in a hurry. Another case of dramatising what should be a routine exercise, it clearly speaks to an origin by someone who really wanted to be in movies rather than flying a desk at Acme Insurance.

It is what it is: This one is a first relation of “we are where we are” — a phrase that will forever be associated with a former taoiseach. It is a meaningless statement bearing zero information, which is probably one of the reasons it remains so popular with politicians and civil servants.

So: Much beloved of techies imparting weighty information to their obviously dimmer fellow human beings. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg uses it repeatedly — “So, Facebook is not one thing”; “So, what we want to do is build a pipeline of experiences for people to have”. Indirectly patronising, it is now so old that us victims would really be so pleased if you would cease and desist. At once.

Peel the onion: OK, we are all foodies nowadays, but mixing cuisine with commerce is never that good an idea. Self-explanatory in that it refers to focusing on a problem by stripping back the layers one at a time, it does fly in the face of good practice. After all, who can peel an onion without shedding a few tears?

Put a record on and see who dances: This one’s pure David Brent in fashioning a supposedly cool alternative to ‘let’s see how it’s received’. The person who uses such terminology was likely putting on ‘Gangnam Style’ at the office Christmas party.

Rockstar: Someone who is very good at their job, interchangeable with ‘ninja’. While praise in any form is of course welcome, it does allow for possible variations on this theme down the line. ‘He’s pure punk when it comes to profit and loss,’ springs to mind. Or how about ‘She’s a little folkie on the financials.’ Not going to work — stop now.

Lots of moving parts: Complicating a straightforward statement meaning an involved project or task is yet another example of using the proverbial hammer to crack an egg. Makes one wish for the simplicity of ‘going forward’ again.