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Hello and welcome to Learning English for Work.
I'm Pippa. And I'm Phil.
Today we're talking about business jargon.
The world of work is full of strange phrases and metaphors and we have some great ones to talk about today.
That's right. In today's episode, we're looking at some jargon we use when talking about the organisation that goes on in a workplace.
Phil, have you noticed that people like to use jargon when they're talking about organising at work?
Yes, definitely. And lots of work is about managing people.
So managers often use corporate jargon to talk about concepts related to that.
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.
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.
You won't let someone else help or get on with the job.
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 Curzon, who is a professor of English language at the University of Michigan, about a few of them.
We have a couple of slangy phrases that involve animals.
We have ducks in a row.
We have herding cats.
You might have heard someone saying herding cats at work.
You could say organising a team was like herding cats 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'd be quite difficult.
Yeah quite chaotic and Anne says it's become a very common metaphor.
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 organized 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.
Okay and the other animal phrase Anne mentioned was ducks in a row.
Where did that come from?
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.
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 Quinan on Worldwide Words, I think persuasively provides some evidence that this may just be related to descriptions of a mother duck with her ducklings organized in a row behind her.
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.
That's a very cute image.
I'm trying to imagine our team following our managers around.
Ah, yeah, like little ducklings.
Yeah, it feels like there's a lot of metaphorical language here.
Yeah, it's fun to try and work out why we say these things.
Where did these strange metaphors come from?
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 cliché, which means something that's been said lots of times before.
So it's not surprising or interesting at all, really.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Heard a phrase at work that you don't understand?
And email us at learning .english at bbc .co .uk and we could read out and explain your phrase in this podcast.
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.
Bye for now.
