In my usual search around the BBC website at lunchtime today I found and article about 50 office speak phrases you love to hate. I've generally found that the phrase that winds me up the most is 'let's touch base' but the phase that I've heard a lot recently - and ashamed to say have said myself on occasion is 'we are where we are'. What a pointless phrase of course we are where we are - where else would we be! The phrase in the list that reminded me of Sally is no 13-14 - "The business-speak that I abhor is pre-prepare and forward planning. Is there any other kind of preparedness or planning?"
So then when I was on the bus home this evening I found myself listening to a woman repeating the phrase 'that's bang out of order' a number of times, which I also thought was a stupid phrase. When I got home I decided to look it up and found this site called The Phrase Finder so now I can look up all those random phrases and find out where they come from. Now I'm off to read about Ne'er cast a clout til May be out, hours of fun!
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3 comments:
The Phrase Finder sounds like such a cool site! I'm going to check it out now...
It's not a business-speak one, but one of my favourites is when someone's telling a story about a conversation: 'And he turned round and said...', 'and she turned round and said...'. I bet they're quite dizzy by the end of it.
The one I always hated was someone saying "Know what I mean?" at the end of a sentence. Someone I worked with said it after practically every sentence, and it was really annoying. Know what I mean?
My other pet hate is "Basically". It used to be "Obviously"
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