I recently read a post or article (can’t remember which) in which the writer invented wholly original business jargon to see how quickly it would come into use with that company. The one I remember was “Let’s triangle back to that” instead of “Let’s circle back to that.” Surprisingly (or not), before long the new terms were being used at team meetings, just as if they actually meant something.

During my unfortunate time in the corporate world, I heard and saw a lot of business sayings and metaphors that were either infuriating or amusing. The infuriating ones were war and sports metaphors. (Once, when the president of the company was giving us all a pep talk, he kept using sports metaphors. The women at the company requested more inclusive ones. The next time he addressed the gang, he was using metaphors like “stick to our knitting,” which is pretty hilarious when you think about it. But I digress.)

Other sports/business metaphors included “Skate to where the puck will be,” “move the goalposts,” “get in an athletic stance,” and “let’s get the blocking and tackling right.” (I suppose you could count “The view only changes for the lead dog,” an “inspirational” poster I saw, if you count the Iditarod as a sporting event (which I do). But I digress again.)

Business jargon also leads to some unique new words, most of which are horrible. The one I found that I actually like is “voluntold,” meaning drafted or otherwise assigned a duty without any actual volunteering occurring.

There were a few aviation metaphors as well. “We’re out of runway” and “Let’s take a 30,000-foot view on this,” and “We’re building the plane while we’re flying it,” which sounds like a bad idea in business and even worse in aviation. {I’m not sure about “break down the silos.” I think they probably mean missile silos, which is sort of like aviation or else war, rather than ones for storing grain. Whichever way they mean it, it refers to getting different departments of an organization to talk to one another. But I digress some more.)

Other business metaphors are just weird. There’s “spread the peanut butter,” which is about allocating resources. (Sometimes, apparently, just “peanut butter” is used as a verb: “Let’s peanut butter this to all the departments.” But I digress yet again.) And there’s the awkward “If you can’t ride two horses at once, get out of the circus!” Apparently they’re saying that the business is a circus, an odd admission to make.

There are obvious clichés: “Think outside the box”; easy-to-interpret ones: “put a pin in it,” “selling bottom-of-the-keg products,” “drinking from a firehose”; and computer jargon: “I want to double-click on your idea.”

Linguist and author Suzette Haden Elgin (The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense; Native Tongue series) often said that there were not enough tactile metaphors in writing to go with all the visual and audio ones. I did find one that I think she would have liked: “Get our arms around a problem.”

(Suzette also said that you could stop any pointless discussion cold by saying, “We’ll, you can’t tell which way the train is going by looking at the tracks.” I’ve never tried it, but I bet it would work. I generally get nothing but confusion when I say, “If my aunt had wheels, she’d be a teacart.” But I digress even more.)

Thankfully, I am out of the business world now, freelancing merrily, if not all the way to the bank, at least to some satisfaction. And any jargon or metaphors I encounter are mine alone.