We've just come across this new light-hearted book of business jargon: Pushing the Envelope by Caroline Taggart (Michael O’Mara Books). We've published stories on business babble before and it's always a popular topic for anyone who's worked in an office. 

Here are a few excerpts from Taggart's book - do let us know what your favorite jargon phrases are!

Ducks in a row
In American bowling terminology, a duck or duckpin, first recorded in 1911, is ‘a small pin shorter than a tenpin but proportionately wider at mid-diameter’. When you line such pins up – in a row – you are ready to bowl at them. If you do the same thing metaphorically, you have everything neat, tidy and organized. Your arrangements are completed, your in-tray and in-box are under control, your filing is done, goodness how your colleagues must hate you.

Gardening leave
A euphemism, in use since the 1980s, for sending someone home on full pay, normally to ‘work out’ a notice period without actually doing any work. In other words, you want rid of him, you don’t want his pernicious influence round the office but if you sack him he’ll sue. The implication is that he will have plenty of time to potter in his garden, which will keep him out of mischief and, specifically and often contractually, prevent him from selling his expertise to your competitors. It’s a bit like house arrest, with fewer guards. And more gardening. Apologies for the sexist use of pronouns here: women may be sent on gardening leave too, but generally only if they have conquered the barriers of the GLASS CEILING and the MARZIPAN LAYER. By the way, Americans call this ‘garden leave’. As a nation they are perhaps less keen gardeners than the Brits, so it may be that those on garden leave are allowed to sit in theirs with a cool drink in their hands, rather than sweating over cutting the grass or weeding the flowerbeds.

Hitting the ground running
Be afraid when you hear this phrase in a job interview. Be very afraid. The company, or at least the area you are being invited to join, is in chaos. It is understaffed and underorganized. There will be no training. There will be no handover period with the previous incumbent, because he or she has been LET GO as a result of causing the chaos in the first place. There will be no suggestion of breaking yourself in gently, finding your feet or feeling your way. You will be expected to know the job inside out from the word go. Did I mention that you should be afraid? Used in a literal sense this expression – as when someone leaps off a train and makes a dash for it – dates back more than a hundred years; the figurative sense is found in the 1960s and like many business metaphors it is billed as ‘colloquial, originally US’.

Knee-jerk reaction
If you are sitting down with your feet off the floor and someone taps you just below the knee with a small hammer, the lower part of your leg jerks forward. Physiologically, this is a knee-jerk reaction – a reflex action that you don’t make consciously and can’t easily prevent. Also called the patellar reflex, it’s been known in medical circles since the early nineteenth century and is a good thing because it means the tendons that control the knee are functioning properly. In business and politics, however, where the expression has been used since the 1960s, a knee-jerk reaction is generally a bad thing: a reaction made automatically, without thought, in a ‘We always do it like this’ sort of way. IF IT AIN’T BROKE, DON’T FIX IT may be a sensible, pragmatic approach; a knee-jerk reaction is plain lazy.