LET’S face it, there are some words that have done their time in business communication and should be retired, or even banned. They are down-right annoying and seem to have the opposite effect when used in conversations meant to, for example, rouse the troops at work.

We use these buzz words to try to impress our colleagues into thinking that we are really more knowledgeable that we are, don’t we? We understand that some of the phrases are necessary evils, but it is time to send some of these words into oblivion.

Hit the ground running: I would really like to thump the brain-addled person who came up with this gem. This phrase, means “get off to a brisk and successful start”, and it is supposed to energise and pump up your audience and make them want to get out there and give of their best in the name of ABC Insurance Company Inc.

However, how many times have you heard these words repeated from the podium, and yet still you have never actually seeing anyone running, or you, yourself, having started to run, find out that you are in a

one-man race (and you are not winning)? Can you believe that the use of this phrase actually saw the light of day some time towards the end of the 19th century in the United States of America. An early citation was found in a story which was syndicated in several newspapers, including The Evening News on April 23, 1895 in a piece ‘King of All The Liars’. Your Honour, I rest my case.

Think outside the box: Now I ask you, what does that term really mean to you? The truth be told, there are some days that thinking is not one of the items we get done on our ‘to do’ list, much less to attempt to do so outside of anything, much less a box. This phrase means, of course, to “think creatively, unimpeded by orthodox or conventional constraints” and was said to have originated in the United States in the late 1960’s. The earliest citation found, was in July 1975 in the magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology, which said, “We must step back and see if the solutions to our problems lie outside the box…” How many times have you heard those words, and have they ever in your life impelled you to move outside of said box? If I had a dollar for every mathematics teacher who encouraged me to think outside the box, I would be Mark Zuckerberg wealthy. For some reason, it is just not one of those phrases that will get me all fired up about creativity and thinking differently.

Throw under the bus: According to Urban Dictionary this phrase means ‘to sacrifice some other person, usually one who is undeserving or at least vulnerable, to make personal gain.’ I am sure whereever you work you have seen it happen before your very eyes to a colleague or even you, yourself, have heard the tyres of said lorry or bus squealing as the vehicle bears heavily down on you. Even though it is one of those phrases that will easily activate the gag reflex, many of us understand exactly what it means. The phrase was said to have been made widely popular by sports journalists since 2004, and was used by mainstream US media in the 2008 elections. US Linguist Geoff Nunberg reported that “under the bus appeared in more than 400 press stories during that United States election campaign. It is still making the rounds today.

At the end of the day: I cannot think of a more overused phrase than this one. It is the king of clichés. What do these words really mean? Is it making reference to the literal end of a weekday when the sun goes down? Or is it the end of the business day, or what? I am guessing that what I mean to say, because it is among my own pet phrases, is ‘finally’. But because one word could not possibly capture the essence of the dramatic ending to the pearls of wisdom we liberally dispense in our conversation, we have to tack on a few additional nonsense words to make us sound important. I am yet to understand why we use this phrase. I guess this is one for Matlock.

Push the envelope: Have you ever been given this task by an unsympathetic supervisor? Did you ever find the envelope and if you did, were you ever able to push it? Did it move? The thing about pushing envelopes, it assumes a lot. One, that the company has envelopes (resources), and secondly that said company wants anything to be changed or moved. Many people are just happy with the way things are right now, no matter how the rest of the world is whizzing by and changing at rapid-fire speed. Nevertheless, a little perspective is great. The phrase, which means, to attempt to extend the current limits of performance, came into general use following the publication of Tom Wolfe’s book about the space programme, The Right Stuff, 1979: One of the phrases that kept running through the conversation was ‘pushing the outside of the envelope’… (That) seemed to be the great challenge and satisfaction of flight test.” Although the term did not originate with Wolfe, he used it in a technical and engineering context. The envelope, in this context, is not a letter holder but a mathematical envelope. Huh? A mathematical envelope is “the locus of the ultimate intersections of consecutive curves”.

Well, let’s hit the ground running so that at the end of the day we can think outside the box, level the playing field and bring our A game.

Yvonne Grinam-Nicholson, (MBA, ABC) is a Business Communications Consultant with RO Communications Jamaica, specializing in business communications and financial publications. She can be contacted at: yvonne@rocommunications.com. Visit her website at www.rocommunications.com and post your comments.