Lingo: The talk of life

<div class="section1"><div class="Normal"><span style="" font-style:="" italic="">The office jargon has become a permanent part of people''s speech. </span><span style="" font-weight:="" bold="" font-style:="" italic="">Pune Times</span><span style="" font-style:="" italic=""> looks at some. Which one are you speaking?</span><br /><br />It is said that the finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.Lingo is just that.Words that come to mean a particular thing and become synonymous with the meaning.<br /><br />Take for example the Human Resources department. No company can do without them, but can we trust them to mean what they say and say what they mean?<br /><br />The HR guys who offer competitive salaries actually mean this; "We remain competitive by paying less than our competitors."<br /><br />Lured by them asking you join "our fast-paced company"? Don''t be, because what they are actually saying is that they have no time to train you.<br /><br />If you hear two corporate czars conversing, you are most likely to hear something like this; "Let''s add value", which basically translates into increasing the worth of something. Funnily though, there is no term for decreasing the worth of something! In the meanwhile, a bottleneck is an essential resource who impedes the rapid completion of a project. Resource bottlenecks are generally those which are overworked and understaffed. For these guys a challenge is a problem. Using the word ''problem'' generates excessive negativity and implies there''s nothing that can be done. Corporates employees like to call their boss, coach. The term ''coach'' has fewer negative connotations, boss.<br /><br />To de-hire is to forcibly terminate a resource''s employment. The resource is then supervised as he or she packs his stuff and is then escorted to the door.<br /><br />In the IT world things are a bit boring. Take for instance, the term, ''being formatted''. It means someone''s gone blank. Who would have guessed that? It''s all about decoding in the the IT world anyway! Having a bug is to have a problem. Meanwhile, if one techie says to another that he/she is in a loop, he is repeatedly saying something or is in a fix. It''s true that medical jargon all too often makes simple and relatively harmless things sound scary. People would quake at a diagnosis of acute paronychia only to feel immense relief to discover that it''s an infected nail. So when your doc says, "We have to suture," he only means joining two edges together by stitching.<br /><br />In call centres, ''hitting the floor'' means going on air and ''to buddy up'' means sticking to a partner and do as he says.<br /><br />The journos play ''second lead'' to no one and when they say they want to do the anchor, they are not talking about a ship. It means the story goes at the bottom of the page. PCs are important for a journalist. Not polite conversations or personal computers but press conferences.</div> </div>