What The Office Actually Means

Office jargon is not stupidity, it is a tool doing a job: it lets people disagree without a row, close a subject without cancelling it, and decline without saying no. Forty-five phrases, each with what it means, where you will hear it, and the sentence that ends it.

What is in it

• The years you could have been born, and what a house, a week of work and a pound actually cost in each of them.
• What has changed since, with the figures rather than the sighing.
• The honest bits about the age, written by somebody not pretending it is fine.
• Quizzes and things to argue about.
• Things you can now say and get away with.
• Around forty pages to fill in, which is the part that survives.

Formats and price

Part of What They Actually Mean, an Home Truths series.

Frequently asked

What does let us circle back actually mean?

It means we will not. It is a way of closing a subject in a meeting without saying no to the person who raised it, which is a real job that a plain refusal does not do. The useful response is to ask when, out loud, because a date turns it back into a decision.

Is the book making fun of people who talk like this?

No, and it would be a worse book if it were. Almost every phrase exists because the plain English version would have caused a problem. The joke is the gap between the two, not the person standing in it.

Is it a book for managers or for everybody else?

Everybody else, mostly, but managers get more out of it than they expect. A good half of the entries are things people say when they cannot say the real thing, and knowing which half is which is more useful the more meetings you sit in.

Does it work outside the UK?

Yes. Meeting-room language is close to identical across English-speaking workplaces, and this is one of the two decoders that needed no rewriting for an American reader.