On December 5th Travis Bradberry posted an article at LinkedIn Pulse titled These Buzzwords Make Smart People Look Stupid. He listed the following 25 jargon phrases, which I have put into alphabetical order:
All hands on deck
Apples to apples
At the end of the day*
Back to the drawing board
Bang for the buck
Circle back around
Elephant in the room
Get my manager’s blessing
Get the ball rolling
Hit the ground running
I don’t have the bandwidth
It’s on my radar
Let’s touch base
Low hanging fruit
Move the goal post
No brainer
On my plate
Par for the course
Ping me
Reinvent the wheel
Synergy *
Take this offline
Think outside the box*
Thrown under the bus
Win-win*
Four of them (indicated by asterisks) previously appeared on a list from Accountemps that I blogged about in an October 14, 2014 post titled 20 annoying buzzwords that nevermore should be used in the workplace.
Travis did not suggest how to replace jargon with plain English. Lucy Kellaway has done that in her Guffipedia, which I blogged about on December 16, 2015 in a post titled Jargon and guff.
Another phrase that should be eliminated is the sports jargon of things being “in play.”
The image inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven was adapted from a Puck cartoon from November 7, 1900 found at the Library of Congress.
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