Buzzwords are everywhere but most of us would rather we didn't hear them. Photo: iStockphoto

Office buzzwords that really drive us crazy

Madeleine Wedesweiler|Apr 17, 2019

For the uninitiated, learning business-speak can be like learning a whole new language.

Whether you work in an office or a trendy ‘start-up space’ your work day is likely to be infiltrated by a whole lot of jargon.

Here we’ve collated some of the most eye-rolling and meaningless phrases of ‘office speak’, to help make your work day a little bit easier.

Synergy

This would surely be number one on an unofficial list of words that get thrown around entirely out of context. Synergy essentially means combining two or more teams or processes to generate more energy or a better result than would have existed separately, but now apparently everything must have ‘synergy’, regardless of whether that makes sense. Even more annoying is ‘synergistically’.

Capacity

Capacity is often used as (what’s perceived to be) a more polite way of saying ‘time’. Ask me “do you have capacity to do this task”, or “have you got time to do this task”, and I won’t really see the difference.

Do we really have time for the word ‘capacity’? Photo: Martin Carlsson

Pick your brain

Take this phrase literally and it sounds gross, but it means to question someone who has more knowledge than you about a subject. A common complaint from scientific and academic experts is that when someone asks to pick their brain they’re often being asked to work for free. This is a favourite expression of journalists and communications professionals.

Amplify

At the beginning of the year British language consultancy The Writer predicted that ”amplify” would be one of the year’s buzziest buzzwords. At the time creative partner at The Writer, Neil Taylor, said “People are using ‘amplify’ as a synonym for ‘improve’ or ‘increase’, but they think – probably subconsciously – that it’s cooler, because its use really took off to describe messages on social media being picked up and repeated.”

Amplify, one of the most buzziest of buzzwords. Photo: Supplied

Pow wow

While it may sound like the name of a B-grade rapper, a pow wow is just a short and efficient meeting. If you have to give your meeting a euphemistic name to make it sound more exciting, then my guess is it’s not going to be a particularly enjoyable meeting.
Pow wow: Do you really have to give that short meeting a name? Photo: Louie Douvis

It’s on my radar

Translates to ‘I’m aware of it’. This fairly ominous expression is often used in a tone suggesting your boss “knows about it but it isn’t a priority and you shouldn’t have brought it up, thanks”.

Touch base offline

This is an unnecessarily complicated way of saying ‘meet up’. You know, like they used to in the good old days before wi-fi was invented and people would go to lunch and ‘talk’.

Touching base offline, or as they used to do in the old days, meet up. Photo: Moodboard

Blue-sky thinking

In manager-speak this is the newer and arguably more irritating version of ‘thinking outside the box’. Blue-sky thinking refers to creative ideas that can’t necessarily be achieved due to practical or financial constraints. To clarify, it doesn’t mean daydreaming or thinking about the sky.