John Daly: Covid-19 infection spreads to business jargon
Covid restrictions have made business jargon more prevalent and annoying.
Are you up to speed on what it means to shift a paradigm, leverage a best practice, or join a tiger team?
If not, you're behind the 2020 business jargon curve, though people find themselves increasingly confused by financial slang.
Business may be the common language of the world, yet we grapple helplessly with its grammar and syntax.
According to a 2019 survey by business technology review site, TrustRadius, 40% of people hear business jargon, cliches, and buzzwords regularly in a work day, and 20% protest their over-use.
They join similar verbal flotsam like ‘touch base’, ‘moving forward,’ and ‘back of the net’ as permanent fixtures in the management-speak dictionary.
The elephant at the jargon table of 2020 was undoubtedly Covid-19, the pandemic that tapped forcefully into the global zeitgeist and had some of us scrambling for urban lingo vocabularies.
‘Isolation creation’ was often an excuse for doing nothing during this peculiar year, or at least trying to design an app based around gardening or online shopping.
Up there with it was ‘Quarantine 15’ – the extra midriff girth we all added from too much wine and a constant diet of streamed entertainment.
‘Flatten the curve’ found new meaning away from the boardroom as we waited each night for the projected model of people infected with the virus over a given period.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump helped make ‘the elbow bump’ a universal greeting to replace the handshake or fist bump, as even they were forced to adjust to ‘the new normal’. Mind you, it wasn’t all about Netflix streaming for those confined to home, as ‘coronials’ referred to babies born under quarantine.
Though it’s been around for some time, ‘reach out’ found new fame this year as a euphemism for making contact via email, text, phone call or instant message.
As employees found themselves straddling their commercial office and home workstation from March onwards, it was frequently a case of ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’ as the status of being in a dark and unfamiliar domain became commonplace.
Anybody trying something new was a ‘disruptor’ in 2020, and even if they weren’t doing a whole lot different to the status quo.
For those of us needing guidance or direction, a visit to the ‘wheelhouse’ became mandatory, an overused synonym for an area of expertise or specialisation.
In a world where ‘tap and go’ paid for even the humble loaf of bread and bottle of milk, businesses were proud to announce that ‘accounts payable automation is in our wheelhouse’.
Another jargon chestnut that found new life in 2020 was ‘content is king’ - a marketing/advertising phrase pushing the importance of catchy wordplay to attract the customer.
In the same linguistic ballpark is ‘freemium’ – mixing free and premium to define the business of attracting potential customers to the paid product by offering a simplified version for free.
Two phrases that emerged last year but found greater prominence in 2020 were ‘drill down’ and ‘deep dive’ - the former detailing the process of problem solving, the latter a more thorough version of brainstorming.
