How many times you heard the polite and respectful sounding "let's take this offline"?
It's a polite way of saying "shut up and stop arguing with me in front of everyone - it is making me look bad".
There are phrases that we utter in a professional corporate setting that doesn't raise a single eyebrow, yet if we were to say to friends or family, we would be mocked or looked at that with that "WTF" facial expression.
Inspired from a recent Reddit post, I've pulled together the classics and added my own fun interpretation of what they really mean.
| Category | Phrase | The Real Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Meetings | Giving you time back | As if one can gift time - What the hell am I going to do with that extra 4 minutes?!?! |
| Stand up / All hands / Town hall | Waste time talking about what we would have been doing had we not been meeting | |
| Deep dive | Take a simple decision and make it hard to implement | |
| Let’s workshop that | Do not like what you suggested, so we’ll have a group session, pretend to listen to others, and then we’ll do what I say. | |
| Decks | Waste time on a nice looking PowerPoint so we can impress others with our creativity and they might realize we have no clue how we are going to do this | |
| Action items / Next steps | Classic COYA tactic to know who to blame when shit doesn’t get done | |
| Avoidance | Circle back / Punt / Table That | We are never to talk of this ever again |
| Put a pin in that | Giving you hope, but we’re really never talking about this again | |
| Take this offline | Shut up and stop arguing with me in front of everyone – I am looking bad | |
| Put that in the parking lot | Documenting that we are never going to talk about this again ever | |
| Have a sidebar | Completely off-topic side conversation, but needs to be justified somehow | |
| Ping me / Reach Out | Giving you the hope that I might help, but don’t even think about calling upon me. I do not want this responsibility | |
| Touch base | I don’t trust you are working on it, so I am letting you know I am watching | |
| Don’t boil the ocean | I know you are going to complicate this very simple task dumb-dumb | |
| Strategy | North star | As if we all know where we are actually going! |
| Paradigm shift | Fuck, that didn’t work. We need to rethink this. | |
| Ecosystem | Make it as awkward as possible to use our product so clients can’t be arsed relearning a new product | |
| Game changer | We’ve actually delivering something useful that our clients have been asking for all along | |
| Run it up the flagpole | It’s a wild crazy idea, so I need to widen the audience outside of these doubting dim wits to those that recognize true genius | |
| Efficiency | Streamline / Automate / Scale | Reduce friction that we introduced previously, and then sell the better way of doing now that we understand what we are doing |
| Low-hanging fruit | Taking credit for the real easy shit | |
| Best practice | The Lemmings justification for doing it a convoluted way | |
| Move the needle | This new feature/idea might actually work this time | |
| Value-add | Delivering on features clients thought they were already getting, so we can’t charge them more | |
| Drill down | I’ve no clue what you just said. Explain it to me like a 5 year old | |
| Close the loop | Did it actually work? | |
| Nonsense | Bandwidth | I have only so many hands and hours in the day |
| Leverage (as a verb) | I need help from someone or something else | |
| Bleeding edge | The old shit we are using is still fine, since we didn’t get budget for the new stuff | |
| Double down | Confirming that we are definitely going in the wrong direction | |
| Metrics | KPI | A metric to measure how poorly you are doing, and will be used to beat you over the head regularly and claim “it’s just data” |
| ROI | Metric to show you are not actually creating any revenue, just more cost | |
| Overused | Synergy | We are a natural fit as we have something in common – we both like the color blue! |
| Cadence | Because saying “recurring” makes me sound dull | |
| Cohort | We are not going to be accused of profiling, so we are going to use this instead of group | |
| Think outside the box | Can you try and have an original thought? Just one. | |
| Let’s unpack that | A completely dumb idea, so let’s really pull it apart and show just how dumb it is | |
| Alignment | Aligned / Alignment / Harmonize | Can everyone make sure they are in agreement with me? |
| Let’s ensure we’re aligned on our deliverables | I want to make sure everyone is definitely doing what I say. | |
| Ego | I told you so | Converting previous unwavering support into disappointment |
| We could have checked it | You should have checked, as it is completely your fault | |
| I fought with management for this | I got shot down and had to come back with my tail between my legs | |
| My team owns… | Get the hell way from the fiefdom I have taken years to build | |
| Thought leader | I really came up with this shit myself | |
| Red Flags | If we’re not growing, we’re dying | We really do need to think of new shit to build |
| Building the plane while flying it | We skipped planning and ignored the experts, so we are literally make shit up as we go along | |
| We can’t do that | I have absolutely no idea how to do that | |
| We’re a family | I am going to ask you to do a lot of shit that is outside of your job description and working hours | |
| Culture fit | I don’t like you at all, but I can’t say that out loud | |
| Radical candor | Going to say something that will most likely appear in my HR record | |
| New normal | We have no clue why its working, but let’s just stick with it | |
| Aggressive | Gentle reminder | I’ve waited long enough now, what the hell are you doing? |
| Transparent | Going to pretend I have given you everything you need | |
| Self-assessment for your annual review | Rate yourself so we can justify what we have already decided | |
| Is the juice is worth the squeeze | That seems like an awfully lot of work to do. Do I really need to do it? | |
| Sexy | We just changed the color/font, so it looks hip | |
| Create me a ticket | I have no clue what you just asked me to do, but hopefully you writing it down will make it more clearer. | |
| I'll create you a ticket | COYA - I want it documented and dated, that I asked you to do this | |
| Metaphors | Eating our own dog food | We’re actually using this crap ourselves as we can’t afford the real version either |
| Lipstick on a pig | We’ve given up. It was harder than we thought and it should now be someone else’s problem. | |
| Customer journey | Trying to convince our clients our way is the right way because we can’t implement it the way they want | |
| 100% | I disagree with you, but there was one small irrelevant point you made that I roughly align with | |
| Let's double click on that | Let's explore this, but I am going to pretend my life is nothing more than a mouse action. Scared to ask what "right click" is |
and I know the first column format is all jacked - WordPress doing me no favors.
