Lord Lionheart

I may be close to landing a new job, since it's been a while I have to brush up on my corporate lingo. For the uninitiated corporate speak is somewhat similar to Orwellian 'newspeak' and is the art of using ever so clever and highly annoying catchphrases and buzzwords in place of common everyday language. This corporate speak is mostly adapted from high technology and mainly spoken by insecure, fat and balding white men working for large corporations to cover up just how mediocre they actually are. Some examples are;

Download me - Can you explain
Synergy - share resources
copacetic - fine, okay
delta - difference, expressed in numbers
bandwidth - attention share
multi-task - work on more than one thing at a time.
kuudos - thanks

Can anyone share some more of these irritating terms with me so I can sound clever on my first day, so the company doesn't realize what a ****-wit I really am?

elfman

"touch base with" (ie speak to briefly) winds me up. As does "what's the scoop?" (ie what is the latest news) - colleague of mine says that all the time.

BTW in the corporate world you must refer to everything, no matter what it is, as a "paradigm". No, I don't know what it means either, but there's a lot of them about.

Roadster280

Ducks in a row - everything in order
Unplanned outage/downtime - it broke
Planned outage/downtime - we knew it was going to break
Irreducible spare capacity - its too expensive to close plants

I prefer the originals though

"You are a c***"
"What the f*** do you think you are doing?"

These are universal in the English speaking world, and timeless classics, not open to interpretation, whilst simutaneously presenting the immediate nature of the problem to the recipient.

Bob

Blimey...scary stuff...well i'm sure you'll be able to impress on your fellow workers the ways of doing nothing while looking busy...BE for instance as a calming device to prevent going postal...and ways around the work proxy

fatbrit

Don't worry Bob! Playing up being a Brit usually gets you further than trying to blend in. Always try to use Brit-specific words they don't understand with a very emphasized accent. They'll be too embarrassed to ask so they'll put it down to that British humour. Gets you noticed, which is actually the most important thing.

gruffbrown

I can get the widow to send you a list, she inadvertently asked me whether I was 'Onboard' the other day, 15 minutes later, I'd ran out of jokes...

CaliforniaBride

How are you coming with that? Usually applies to a project. Means nothing grammatically.

dunroving

Of course there's also "network" = kiss *ss and pretend you like someone you don't know but might come in useful.

Lord Lionheart

Were you on a pier at the time?

Bob

hehe...aye, though calling the boss a load of bollocks and a minging pair of chuddies might not go down so well all the same

antjen

arghhh - that one always used to annoy me when i worked for a american company - my boss liked to use that one all the time!!!!

Ant

Big D

Go with a lycra solution - one size fits all

Actually heard this said in seriousness and pissed myself - we played buzz word bingo quite a bit when i used to work for one of the big 4 consulting firms - priceless!!

Lord Lionheart

Being in sales I also need to be familiar with all the sporting and sales cliches such as;

All the bells and whistles - numerous product features
Show and tell/dog and pony show - presentation
The whole nine yards - everything
touch base - liaise

I already hate my job and I haven't even accepted the offer yet

gruffbrown

Just run it up the flagpole and see if it flies...

Big D

...see who salutes - apparently used to find out who was loyal to who in days of the Empire etc etc....