Business Jargon: Jargon for ideas
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Hello and welcome to Learning English for Work, our podcast to help you improve your business English. I'm Pippa. And I'm Phil. Today we're talking more about business jargon, the strange acronyms, words and phrases that people use at work that not everyone else understands.

Yes, and in this episode we're talking about the jargon people use when they're talking about ideas. You might have found that when people need to be creative at work and come up with ideas, they can use quite a lot of jargon, Phil. Yes, there's a lot of expressions that describe the way we think about things or the way we come up with new ideas. And I'm not sure there's that many words that aren't jargon that can talk about that very easily. So,

these jargon expressions kind of fulfil a need. Yeah, they can sound a bit cliche sometimes, but I think, as you say, they're commonly understood by lots of people who work in English, and so it's good to know them. OK, so let's look at a few examples of jargon that people use to talk about ideas at work. And, well, the first one I thought we should look at, Pippa, what could you say about think outside the box? OK.

Well, think outside the box is one of these expressions that you mentioned, Phil, that is really about the way that we think about something. And it just means to think differently about something. So if you can imagine, the box is kind of the limit of the things that you usually think about. And so to think outside the box is to kind of think differently, to try and come up with something new.

So, yeah, I suppose if you want to come up with an idea that's different to things that have come before, then you need to think outside the box to make it happen. Yeah. And when you're having a meeting about your idea, somebody might say, oh, come on, think outside the box. And that would mean that all the ideas so far haven't been kind of interesting enough or different enough. OK, so let's think outside the box. The next one on the list I've got here is blue sky thinking.

OK, so blue sky thinking. This is all about imagination, right, Phil? Yes, it is. If you're doing blue sky thinking, you're thinking of ideas that might not be practical, but they're new or different. So if you're imagining a world where there's nothing holding you back.

Okay, so it's kind of to do with the weather. So if you think about the sky being blue, that's a good day. Everything's possible. The weather will be good. And so you could do whatever you want. So it's an optimistic way of thinking. So if you're blue sky thinking, you're kind of assuming things will be possible and things are good.

Yes. OK, what have we got next? We've got run it up the flagpole. OK, this is one I didn't understand until quite recently. I had assumed that this phrase meant something different to what it means. So it helps sometimes to hear the second half, which we don't always say, which is run it up the flagpole, see who salutes.

Yes, there's kind of a military idea there or something, isn't there? All it means is in the same way that when you put a flag on a flagpole, everyone can see it, is you test an idea and you make it so that it's visible to everyone and see what people think about it, see how it works, etc.

Yeah, it's a bit of a strange expression, but it just means test it and see what happens. Yeah, so maybe a product to see if it's popular or maybe it's just a new way of working at your company. You could run it up the flagpole, just kind of have a go and see how people react. Now, the next one we've got, it sounds very literal, this one, brain dump.

Okay, a brain dump. This is something that I do sometimes and it basically just means to...

dump all the information so put all the information that you have in your brain into one place so for example if I was trying to write something and I didn't really know where to start I would just do a brain dump I would just put all the things I knew into one document and then I could think about the structure of what I want to write later I can move my ideas around the brain dump is just kind of the starting point yeah I think it's the sort of thing I find quite helpful actually you just

put all your ideas down and you try and work out how they link together or what they mean and you can build something out of it sometimes.

We have another similar one, also to do with brains, but rather than brain dump, we have brainstorm, which I think is something you usually do with another person. Yeah, so this is usually the way we would describe people getting together to come up with ideas. So you could have a brainstorming meeting and that's where you all decide you're going to say half an hour and we're just going to try and come up with some ideas about something. ♪

We also often see lots of jargon when there's a new technology or a new product in a business.

Yeah, and so once people have a new idea, then they often develop language to talk about it. And a big recent example could be hybrid working. It existed before 2020, but we didn't really talk about it much. After the pandemic, it became very common. People spend some time working at home, some time working in the office. And so we came up with a word or an expression to describe it, hybrid working.

Yeah, and so that's probably jargon that most people know now. And we've worked with our colleagues at Business Daily to make a programme all about jargon and why we use it. Their reporter, Ed Butler, spoke to Sam White, who's CEO of Stella Insurance, who thinks that companies can sometimes use unhelpful jargon to talk about their new ideas. I watch in the investment markets, you've got a new start-up and they're wanting to raise funds more

there becomes a bit of a, you know, whatever is the most fashionable thing to talk about. And there'll be jargon associated with it. So might have been blockchain a few years ago and smart contracts and

Now it's generational AI and there's a load of new jargon that goes in with that. So jargon is kind of like fashion. As people have new ideas like blockchain, which is the technology behind digital currencies such as Bitcoin, they need new words to talk about these new technologies that not everyone else understands. And Sam thinks that people often use this jargon to impress investors.

And that's how a lot of the time people use to push up values of businesses, that they're doing something really sexy and different and interesting. And here's all this new language that's associated with it. And I do think there is some of that going on. Yeah. And a secret hope, I suppose, that the other person doesn't understand what you're talking about, but is impressed by it. Yeah, absolutely.

Developing new jargon for new ideas is a natural part of language change and different professions like lawyers, engineers and scientists will have their own professional jargon. You may have some in your job. Yes, I guess the difficulty comes when different professions are talking to each other. For example, when Sam talks about technology companies talking to investors using lots of jargon that the investors don't understand.

We have an episode all about jargon for technology coming up in the series. Send us any words or phrases that confuse you and we'll try and talk about them in the programme. You can email us on learning.english at bbc.co.uk.

That's it for this episode. We'll be back next week with more strange business jargon. For more help with your business English, visit our website bbclearningenglish.com. Bye for now. Bye.

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