Chapter 3 of 10All chapters
Chapter 3 of 10
Idioms at work
The business dialect.
The familiar set
Touch base, circle back, run it up the flagpole, boil the ocean, move the needle, ballpark figure, in the weeds.
- Many are opaque to colleagues who learned English elsewhere.
- Some are so overused that they signal vagueness rather than meaning.
Plain alternatives
Almost every business idiom has a shorter literal equivalent: check in, revisit, estimate. Using it costs nothing and includes everyone in the room.