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cover of episode Business Jargon: Jargon for organising

Business Jargon: Jargon for organising

2024/11/4
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Learning English For Work

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Anne Curzan
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Phil
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Pippa
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Pippa: 我是Pippa。Phil: 我是Phil。我们今天讨论的话题是商业术语。工作中充满了奇怪的短语和隐喻,我们今天将讨论一些很棒的例子。Pippa: 是的,在今天的节目中,我们将探讨一些在谈论工作场所组织时使用的行话。Phil,你有没有注意到人们在谈论工作组织时喜欢使用行话?Phil: 是的,绝对的。很多工作都与人员管理有关。因此,管理人员经常使用公司行话来谈论与之相关的概念。Pippa: 是的,我们之前在节目中讨论过,人们有时会觉得公司行话令人困惑或恼人。有趣的是,一项对英国商界领袖的调查发现,他们实际上喜欢使用工作行话。他们发现这些短语很有用,而不是令人讨厌。关于管理风格,也有很多行话。微观管理是一个经常在工作中使用的词,而且经常被用来负面地描述那些想要控制任务的每一个小细节的人,他们不会让别人帮忙或继续工作。许多用于描述组织事物和人员的短语都相当奇怪,而且意义不大。所以我采访了密歇根大学英语语言学教授Anne Curzan,讨论了其中一些问题。 Phil: 是的,毫无疑问。很多工作都与人员管理有关。所以管理者经常使用公司行话来谈论与之相关的概念。 Anne Curzan: 这个说法在我有生之年才出现,看起来确实如此。我们当然有证据表明,早在20世纪80年代就已经出现了,并且在过去25年里发展得相当迅速。很多用于描述组织事物和人员的短语都相当奇怪,而且意义不大。

Deep Dive

Chapters
This chapter explores the prevalence and perception of business jargon in the workplace. It introduces the topic by mentioning the use of strange phrases and metaphors in the professional world and touches on a survey revealing that UK business leaders find jargon useful rather than annoying.
  • Prevalence of business jargon
  • Survey of UK business leaders: find jargon useful
  • Jargon related to managing people

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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. Mm.

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

often negatively, to describe someone who wants to control every small part of a task, who 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

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.

OK, 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 Quinion 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. E.

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?

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? 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. Bye. Bye.

Want more from BBC Learning English? Test your level with our online quizzes. Learn new phrases from your favourite presenters and find transcripts of our programmes to help you read along. Head to our website, bbclearningenglish.com.

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