The Nose: The Semiotics Of Office Jargon
This show digs deep and gives you a synergistic ROI.
Here is what we propose to talk about on The Nose today - Bewlidering office jargon.
The semiotics of button-down collars. Why anyone should care about the upcoming royal wedding. The possibly overstated report of a gay caveman ...
Is there a thread? I think it's the way we extract meaning from everything. Office jargon grates on us because it seizes our primary system for conveying meaning -- language -- and twists it. Button-down collars? Clothing is full of hidden meaning. The royal wedding -- it means something different to me, an Irish-American who might enjoy owning a Will and Kate toilet seat than it would to someone more respectful of English royalty. The caveman? Archeologists extracting meaning from a slender physical record. The shutdown? Define its meaning, and you win the match.
Leave your comments below, e-mail colin@wnpr.org or Tweet us @wnprcolin.
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E-mail from Wade
Interesting show today. I think you have the length reference wrong in basketball. It isn’t a substitute for height but rather describes the player’s wing span.
Wade
someone who listens to far too much sports radio as a drive around for work...
E-mail from David
Another one…..”to be honest with you”.
As if you haven’t been up to now….Great Show.
E-mail from Tanya
The wheelhouse is the captain's domain. The Roundhouse is where trains converge and are rerouted on another track. I know this from having The Little Engine that Could read to me as a child. Also my maternal grandfather worked on a railroad.
E-mail from Matt
I left the military recently and am in business school right now, so I feel like I know twice the jargon I should. I think you’re right about “task” as a verb having its origins in the armed forces. In the job I had just before leaving, our purpose was to assign “taskers” to other units.
One other military jargon oddity that always amused and confused me was the phrase “on digits” to mean an electronic copy. As in, “could I get that report on digits?” I think it’s a weird mix of “digital” and “on electrons”, but wherever it comes from, it’s rampant in the Army.
E-mail from Audrey
When someone is really bad at their job, they are “not a good fit.”
We measure things with “metrics” which I find awkward – why not with a measurement?
A euro-sounding phrase used by Americans where I work is “Thanks to …” as in ending an email message with “Thanks to inform your team of this.”
E-mail from Elizabeth
A lawyer doing a training on sexual harassment and diversity/discrimination law used this term REPEATEDLY. It seems to be often used in the context of getting to the point of the subject. But why do we need to "drill down" to a topic, when the whole point of a training or seminar is to talk about said topic? Should someone doing sexual harassment prevention training be talking about "drilling down" on anything?
Also, I think "length" is used in basketball to mean their wing-span; how wide they can get their arms and legs out to reach the ball.
E-mail from Bobbi
NO, I don’t “SEE” what you’re saying!! But, I can hear you just fine
E-mail from Terry
"My question to you is..."
If someone is unable to word a question that it not immediately recognized as such, it probably isn't worth asking - and the redundancy is a waste of airtime.
E-mail from R&D-H
:...at the end of the day," blah,blah
always uttered by a BS artist
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