Business Jargon: What is jargon?
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Hello and welcome to Learning English for Work. I'm Pippa. And I'm Phil. In this podcast, we talk about how you can improve your English in the workplace. And today, we're talking about a big part of work life – business jargon.

Now, jargon is what we call words and phrases used by a group of people, like a team in an office, that not everyone understands. Yeah, so think about acronyms or phrases and shortenings, words that you use at work that if you were to say them at home, people would say, what are you talking about?

Yes, that's right. You may have experienced this. You start a new job and everyone's using strange words and phrases and you have no idea what they're talking about. It's probably not a problem with your English. It's all jargon. Yeah, when I started at BBC Learning English, I had that exact problem. You guys had different acronyms for programme names and lots of processes that I didn't know about and it took me ages to understand what everyone was talking about.

We teamed up with our colleagues at Business Daily, who make programmes about the world of business for the World Service, to try and understand why we use so much jargon at work and whether it's useful. Their reporter, Ed Butler, spoke to some office workers in London to understand more. So I've come now to the heart of the city of London, right by St Paul's Cathedral,

Around me are people in suits and ties, having a quick coffee break between, no doubt, huge deals. I'm going to find out how they feel about jargon.

I hate it. All the acronyms, all the things like, oh, everyone talks in metaphors that I don't understand. Yeah, I love it. I love using them. Really? They sound more important, don't they? Yeah. They sound like you know what you're doing. How do you feel about it? I guess initially it can be a bit alienating because you do not know what people are talking about. But after a while, it's kind of nice, I guess, because you feel like you belong to that group where everybody is speaking the same language in some sense. So, yeah, I

OK, it seems like people can't agree about whether jargon is good or bad, but lots of them use it. So let's talk about some examples. Pippa, is there any jargon that you hear all the time?

Yeah, one that I hear quite a lot is people will say something like, can you get that to me by end of play? And so end of play would mean the end of the working day, maybe 5pm. But it's a bit confusing, end of play. I think it's from cricket, that one, isn't it? Is it? A lot of them are sports metaphors, which I don't like because I don't like sports.

There's one that you told me about, boil the ocean. I'm not so familiar with that one. Could you tell me what that means? Yeah, so boil the ocean is a phrase that we use to talk about an ambitious approach to solving a problem. So the idea is that you're doing a lot of work to achieve a very small thing. So if you wanted to boil the ocean, you'd need a lot of effort. And people will sometimes say, let's not boil the ocean. So let's not put too much effort in just to achieve a very small thing.

I'd heard a similar one, let's not eat the elephant all at once, saying that you should break down a big task like eating an elephant into small parts and just do a small thing first, then the next thing. Are there any business phrases like this that you like, Phil? Yes, actually. There's one I really like because I think it describes something

in quite a short way and it describes something complicated. We might talk about a project or something we're working on as having a lot of moving parts like some great big clockwork thing and I really like the idea. It just means that there's lots of things that are happening that have to be coordinated to work together so that you have to be careful when you change one thing that it has an effect on lots of other things that are connected and

Yeah, I use that. So if someone's asking, you know, how projects going, I might say, oh, it's got a lot of moving parts. And I'm just therefore saying it's very complicated and maybe a little bit stressed about it. I'm hoping everything comes together and works well. We would love to hear which phrases drive you mad at work or about any jargon that you'd like to understand better.

Email us at learning.english at bbc.co.uk and tell us the business jargon you'd like us to talk about. Now, learning about some of these strange phrases can be fun.

But it's also complicated. You mentioned, Pippa, that when you started working here that you didn't always understand what we were talking about. Yeah, so when I started learning English, I didn't understand some of the jargon. And that can be strange because when you use these phrases, you have a sense of belonging. But if you don't understand them, then you can feel a little bit left out.

And there was actually a study by LinkedIn and Duolingo, which found that a lot of people who speak English as a second language found that work chat made them feel quite isolated. They struggled to kind of learn all these different phrases that people were using all the time. And I spoke to John Fazzett, who is an expert in workplace culture and language at the University of Nova Scotia in Canada, to learn more about the impacts of business jargon.

You have just cases where you may not understand only half of what was said. You're being asked to do a project. You didn't really get some of the terms and you didn't do a great job on it. If someone is using jargon that not everyone understands, it can be awkward, but it can also slow down the work that's going on.

You may feel very confident that you understand what is happening. And that's the sinister part of all of this. You may completely believe that you are fully understanding what's being said. But one or two key words can make it the opposite of what you expected. So you provide a document based on what you thought, but it's the opposite.

Love it or hate it, business jargon is everywhere in international workplaces. And we're making a series all about jargon phrases, what they mean and how best to use them. Send us any phrases that you'd like us to talk about to learning.english at bbc.co.uk.

And if you want to learn more about business jargon, you can hear the full program we made with Business Daily in their podcast feed. Search Business Daily in your podcast app or follow the link in the notes to this program. Thanks for listening. Bye for now. 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.

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