(Click here for that gloriously NSFW George Carlin link).

From that aggressively buoyant job ad to your career-change-opportunity-themed redundancy letter, euphemisms abound, and none of them good.

Every day, corporate jargon encroaches further into the English lexicon, and we think it’s time to take a stand.

So reprioritise your current action items; this is the Idealog guide to the worst of the words, the cruddiest of the corporatese and the most awful of the office waffle.

The list:

Action items – A simple ‘to do’ list, but with an air of urgency about it

Bean counter – A term you use when you think you’re cooler than the people in accounts

Coal face – The place where the programmers sit

Decruitment – To fire someone with extreme prejudice

Drilling down – Analysing an employee’s idea in detail sufficient to eventually claim it as your own

Embracing sustainability – To procure a recycling bin

Face time – What happens for two minutes prior to a decruitment

Game changing – The way you describe your product right before you lose all your money

Hot desk – What you call your desk after it’s been taken away

Human capital – The single worst way to describe a human

Imagineer – What someone with an idea for an app calls themselves

Leading edge/bleeding edge – Technology so new and cool it makes you want to evoke swordsmithery

?Learnings – The plural form of a word with no plural form

Leverage – What the Mafia says it’s doing when it’s breaking your fingers/something a lever does

Luddites – Anyone who doesn’t want your app

Meeting stakeholder expectations – Doing as you’re told

Outside the box – The way you describe the thinking behind that idea you stole from Idealog

Peek behind the kimono – A phrase that’s supposed to say ‘this is revealing information’, but in fact says ‘Hey, ladies/I’m that guy/don’t leave your drink unattended’

Putting your feelers out – Posting a work-related request on Facebook

Resonate – To like something

Rightsizing – Downsizing

Salt mines – Where middle managers say they work

Serial Entrepreneur – A person who frequently starts new ventures, regardless of the consequences

Sideways – The direction things go when they go straight down

Skillset – To describe one skill as many

Three-drink lunch – A five-drink lunch

Unpack (an idea) – The preparation you do before you reject an idea

Verbing – What business does to English

Visioneering – What imagineers say they do

With all due respect – The respect you give to someone you don’t respect

Now check out part 2 here.