Business Jargon: Jargon about delays
06:18 Share

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Step into the world of power, loyalty and luck. I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse. With family, cannolis and spins mean everything. Now, you want to get mixed up in the family business. Introducing the Godfather at choppacasino.com.

Test your luck in the shadowy world of The Godfather Slots. Someday, I will call upon you to do a service for me. Play The Godfather, now at Chumpacasino.com. Welcome to the family. No purchase necessary. VGW group void where prohibited by law. 21 plus terms and conditions apply. ♪

Hello and welcome to Learning English for Work and our special series all about business jargon. I'm Phil. And I'm Pippa. We've been talking about the strange words and phrases we use at work that not everyone understands. And today we're focusing on the ways we talk about delays. Yes, you can visit our website for a transcript of this episode to read along with. That's bbclearningenglish.com.

So Phil, sometimes it can feel like things are happening really slowly at work. Yes, it can be frustrating, can't it? If you've got an idea you really want to get started on, but maybe there's not enough time, there's not enough space, there's other more important things. Yeah, or you've got something you're really passionate about and you're in meetings and you just feel like other people are delaying it. They don't want you to kind of get cracking on your idea.

And we're going to look at some common jargon phrases that are used to talk about delays. Yeah, so the first phrase we have is to put something on the back burner. Do you know what that means, Phil?

Um, it sounds like something to do with cooking. Well, I think it actually is. So if you think about your stove, your place where you cook things, a stove or a hob, you have hot rings in the front and then you might have a smaller ring and that's the back burner.

So it cooks things more slowly. So we're using this metaphorically. So if we put something on the back burner, we're putting it somewhere it's going to cook more slowly. So it's the things that are less urgent or important if you're going to stop making something a priority, for example.

Yes, there's another one we've got here to park something. And yes, it is what you do with your car. Of course, if you park your car, then you leave it somewhere and you don't do anything to it for a while.

And with work, it means the same thing. You leave it and you don't do any work on it for now. Maybe you come back to it later. Yeah. So if you were in a meeting and you were talking about a project and then your boss said, oh, I think we're going to park that project for now. That means we're not going to do any more work on it at the moment. The next one we've got here is to put a pin in something.

which is about remembering something for later. I don't know, maybe like pinning something to a notice board or in your calendar or something. Yeah. So when we put a pin in something, we mean we need to kind of remember it. We need to know that it was important. So people might say this if they're having an interesting and useful conversation at work and then something else gets in the way, you know, maybe somebody calls or...

or there's a meeting. And the idea with saying, oh, let's put a pin in this, is that you pause the discussion, but you remember what you were talking about so that you can talk about it later. So it's only a small delay, unlike the other phrases that we've talked about. Right, now, a lot of these phrases have got this idea that you might return to something later. So they're often used like this.

Although they could also be a polite way of telling you just to stop working on something and maybe you're not actually going to go back to it in future. So it's difficult to know whether you ever will return to something. If I say, oh, put a pin in that idea, Phil, come back to me later about that, I might actually mean, oh, actually, can you just focus on what I've asked you to do? It's kind of difficult to see and these are kind of some of the nuances we get with using this kind of jargon. ♪

So that's some phrases that are often used to pause work on certain projects or ideas. But we also have a few common phrases to talk about a situation where delays keep happening, Phil. Yes, maybe sometimes you just put something off and it means to delay something. And we often put something off because we just don't want to do it.

Yeah, that's a really common phrasal verb. So you could just say, oh, I'm going to put that off until later. It means you just don't do it for now. Another phrase we have that we've actually talked before about on this podcast is the idea of kicking the can down the road. So if you kick the can down the road, instead of solving the problem, you just kick.

delay dealing with it. So the problem doesn't go away, you just kick the can down the road, but you'll have to probably deal with it later. And while we're talking about kicking, you can also kick something into the long grass. And that's similar to kicking the can, except we use this when we think someone's delaying something and they hope people will forget about the problem. It's in the long grass, no one can see it. Mm.

Yeah, people sometimes use this when they're talking about politics as well. So they might say that a politician is kicking a problem into the long grass and they're just hoping maybe that nobody notices and it's not going to become a problem in the future. Do people use strange phrases at work you'd like to understand better? Or maybe there's some business jargon that just drives you mad. Email us at learning.english at bbc.co.uk.

That's it for this episode of Learning English for Work. Next time, we'll talk about the jargon for success at work, and there's quite a lot of it. See you then. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Thanks for listening to Learning English for Work. Did you know we have a BBC Learning English email newsletter? Subscribe for our latest lessons, worksheets and quizzes and weekly tips to help you study. Just search BBC Learning English newsletter or follow the link in the notes for this programme.

Hello, it is Ryan. And we could all use an extra bright spot in our day, couldn't we? Just to make up for things like sitting in traffic, doing the dishes, counting your steps, you know, all the mundane stuff. That is why I'm such a big fan of Chumba Casino. Chumba Casino has all your favorite social casino-style games that you can play for free anytime, anywhere with daily bonuses. That should brighten your day a little. Actually, a lot. So sign up now at chumbacasino.com.

That's ChumbaCasino.com. No purchase necessary. VTW. Void where prohibited by law. See terms and conditions. 18 plus.