'If you can imagine the business as a pie...'

The Office is the best TV series ever - we all know that. Amongst much good work, it pays homage to one of my favourite lexical categories - business speak. Like most annoying human habits, business speak seems borne of insecurity; in this case, suppressed frustration and feelings of inadequacy. Business speak is confusing and unnecessary. It masquerades as something which actively clarifies an idea, when in fact it does the very opposite. It is the antithesis of brevity, concision and clarity. At its very worst, it's used to artificially elevate the user above others and needlessly belittle those who, quite understandably, find it almost undecipherable. Make no mistake; those using it are the ones to be mocked, not those of us who manage just as well with normal English in the office as we do out of it. But now to the point of this post - classic examples...

• Synergy - e.g. 'I was tasked to create synergy within the company'. Were you? You're an arse.
• .............-wise - e.g. 'I was dressed too casually so the boss asked me how I was fixed suit-wise.'
• Eyeballing - e.g. 'Have you had that eyeballed?' 'Who's doing eyeballing today?' 'Let me eyeball that first.' Christ almighty, what's wrong with checking it?
• Functionality - e.g. 'My workstation has no functionality.' No, there's a problem with your computer.
• Workstation - e.g. see above. I'd let them have it if they were referring to the desk they sit at but they're not, they're using it as a substitute for the word 'computer'.
• Visibility - e.g. 'I've got no visibility on that.' You mean you can't see it, or you can't access it.
• Close of play - e.g. 'I'll have that over to you by close of play today.' If you're in a grotesquely boring office, where people say that sort of thing out loud, without a hint of irony, you won't be able to adequately express how unsuitable using 'play' as a metaphor for 'work' really is.
• Blue sky thinking - e.g. 'I need some blue sky thinking on how to express my desire to have some original ideas on a given subject.'
• Communicate - e.g. 'If I want you to go ahead, I'll communicate that to you.' What you'll do, is 'tell' me.
• Pre-plan - e.g. 'Can we pre-plan for that?' No, you can't. You can plan for it, or not.
• Action. (v) - e.g. 'I'm going to action that.' 'I'm actioning that as we speak.' ' Has that been actioned?' There are so many wonderfully descriptive verbs in the English language that using 'action' for all of them is more than a shame.
• Let's run it up the flag pole and see who salutes - Award for the most outlandish business related phrase I've ever heard. Breathtaking.
• Strategic incompetence - A phrase used to describe the act of doing something deliberately badly in order to avoid doing it again in the future, e.g. making someone an unsatisfactory cup of tea in order to avoid future tea-making duties. This is the only phrase I've ever heard that I like, mainly because it was created in jest.

"Yeah, I'm fine..."

Should you ever find yourself in the unenviable position of entering a restaurant in the United States, you will undoubtedly be greeted by a woman so gushing that she veritably spews out the phrase 'how ARRRRE yew?!' before the door's finished closing. 

A response to the question posed isn't even expected, and whilst you think momentarily about answering, the waitress will usually have wandered off to get you a copy of the wine list. It's not that I wish she really did care about how I'm doing but precisely because we both know she doesn't, that I find it ferociously irksome. 'You're welcome' sits happily, for me at least, in the realms of phatic claptrap that nobody takes any notice of when muttered as a polite acknowledgement. We take it as read that this phrase really is totally vacuous, and one of its numerous advantages compared with 'how are you?' is that there is no context in which a response is ever required or desired (accept perhaps in a particularly wearing piece of dialogue only imaginable in an Austen novel "I can assure you Ms Bennett, it is much gratifying to know so!" "Oh Mr Darcy! You are more the welcome than I can ever remember anyone ever being so in my entire life!").

'How are you?' is barely acceptable as a throw-away question, even between friends who could claim to have any interest in the answer; do we really want to go further and relegate it to the utter banal by using it to greet strangers we know we'll never see again? Consider how rarely you're asked the question by someone really meaning it - someone who actually wants to know if you feel happy; how the things in your life are going and what might be worrying you. You hear the question so often that interpreting it with meaning will probably leave you slightly confused for the first few moments; then you may feel so moved that you sink to the floor, weeping like a small child. The power the question has when used in this context puts the waitress's version of it to shame and shows that 'how are you?' isn't a phrase we should allow to become so devoid of meaning that we can't use it for anything else but chit-chat. It's a rare and beautiful thing when someone asks 'how are you?' and wants more than three words and a shrug. Asking a total stranger 'how are you?' because you're about to serve them food or sell them clothes is odd enough, but totally disengaging before they've even responded only serves as proof that you really don't care, even if, for some unfathomable reason, you felt obliged to ask anyway.