Friday, October 10, 2008

Some new words I've learned recently.

What I truly love about working a corporate job is the lingo people use. Because the lingo tends to be somewhat invented (and no, I didn't mean inventive) and slightly silly, especially when there is another way to say the words that is more common to the English language. And then some words are real words but used in a new and different way.

Banks are on every one's mind. Last week someone told me that some banks are "toxic." I immediately stopped listening to the next two or three sentences coming out of this person's mouth and was completely fixated on how she used the word toxic to describe how some banks are falling apart.

To me, toxic implies something dangerous to human, animal or plant life, and to use it to describe a business seems rather, for lack of a better word, just plain mean. Isn't it weird how people do this? I mean really, would you drive by the nearest discount shoe store and announce you wouldn't shop there because it's toxic? I didn't think so.

The other word I just learned today was "de-risk." You know, instead of lessening a risk, or reducing a risk, or toxifying a risk so the risk dies and there is no risk left, and hey, while we're at it, we might as well sit the risk in that toxic bank over there and kill everything associated with that risk, we'll instead "de-risk" it. I had to edit something where this term was used. It was a quote from someone else, so I didn't feel bad when I changed it to "reduce the risk," because I'm sorry, you really can't de-risk anything; there is always going to be risks with everything in life.

Another word that's been around for awhile now, but just drives me absolutely insane is "task." As a noun it isn't annoying. As a verb? Annoying. The first time someone said that to me, I was like, "What???" She said to me, "I task that to you." It truly does take me a while to understand sentences when words are used in a new way, so I was like, task that to me? That doesn't make sense....at all. And then I realized she was really saying, "I'm going to make you do this because I don't want to and so you better do it because now it's your task and not mine, lucky you."

I've created my own office lingo, such as whacka-do, wonky, you rock, po-po, and nutball among others. As you can tell, I take my corporate life seriously. Feel free to use any of it.

1 comment:

Kmommy said...

LOL! I love your office terminology!