Past its sell-by date

Literally

At the end of the day.

Curate's egg

(Not entirely over-used, I suppose.)

7. Drinking the KoolAid

Eh?

steve

In my job I videotape myself occasionally for teaching purposes. It is troubling to discover how much we use stock words and turns of phrase time and time again.it is not just radio presenters!

Bruce

Basically...

+1 - overused and wrongly too, like 'curate's egg' which means not good, not 'good in parts', 'and up to a point, Lord Copper' which means 'not at all', 

Believing BS because a guru says so

The term "Curate's egg" is usually used where you try to find something good to say about a thing that is not good at all.  When his host apologises for serving the Curate a bad egg, the Curate replies politely explaining that it's good in parts, when in fact it plainly is not.

Business-speak is dreadful and, sadly, becoming ubiquitous.

Of all the mangled and egregious "words" the  business types, marketing men and MBA wankers have inflicted upon us, "learnings" is perhaps the most hateful.

+1 K.... Would just like to add the dreadful 'Distance Travelled'  G 

and "that's challenging" (= you haven't got a hope in hell of achieving it). Plus "you've got development needs" (= you're bl**dy useless but I'm not allowed to say so).

Grrr.. 

Going forward; meet up with; carded, medalled and every other verbing of nouns...

We used to do something then we had to actively do it and now, for goodness sake, we have to proactively do it. Madness. I imagine that if you proactively do it you'll end up with something very unique. Madness.

I think there are bigger things to worry about. I don't find this stuff dreadful or sad. They are just colloquialisms and/or jargon. No malice or harm is intended nor caused. It is simply a way of speaking. Part of the development of language. Popular expressions and usages become normalised and part of language. Unpopular ones die out.

To call a word like learnings "hateful" is to really overreact, in my opinion.

What would you use instead?

"At the end of the ride, we consulted our map and estimated that the distance travelled was 100km." Seems OK to me.

It's all about context! 

And if something is challenging, how would YOU express it? I have no problem with a task being described as challenging. 

If an employee was trying hard, had potential, but needed additional training/advice/mentoring/experience would you skip right past all that and just call them bloody hopeless. Or would the expression "development needs" perhaps summarise your thinking? Seems just fine to me, if perhaps a little vague without additional elaboration. Do you think people are born with all the skills and experience they will ever need? We all have development needs.

"stakeholder"

SJB

Would criticize those who would use the expression that a project or endeavour had "a long way to go", even though it is true only in a figurative sense? Or would you insist on the technically accurate "there is a lot of work still to be done"?

We use things like distance as metaphors or analogies all the time. Using the term "distance travelled" when we're not actually talking about kilometres is hardly the most egregious use of this sort of thing. I'd argue that it adds colour to the language (not REALLY colour, of course) and can serve to aid understanding.

We should perhaps back off from these things in formal reports, but to use this sort of metaphor in discussion is just fine by me.

An ex-boss of mine once asked me to kick the tyres. I asked him if I should grab the low hanging fruit at the same time. He never used jargon again. Clearly he had taken a bite of the reality sandwich and changed his offering.

That is actually a really useful and powerful term to summarise the disparate groups of people that have an interest in a particular issue or project.

Shareholders, lenders, regulators, employees, customers, suppliers, neighbours and communities might all be affected by, or have an interest in, project development decisions. What term would you use to summarise these groups, other than "stakeholder"? These groups all "hold stakes". Stakeholder seems nearly perfect to me.

Oh come on. You weren't seriously affronted by someone using the term "kick the tyres"? Did you not know what he meant?

If he had asked me to shake the tree, that would have been different. The man was a ****.