By Roz Morris, Managing Director, TV News London Ltd
I finally gave in and looked it up. Just what exactly does ‘off-ramp’ mean? BBC news reporters and others keep using this word frequently in relation to President Trump and politicians in difficulty ‘needing an off-ramp’.
I thought it just meant needing a way out.
According to Google that is one of the meanings.
However, off-ramp is also American for what we Brits call a slip road, a short road going off a motorway. Sorry – freeway.
But, keep up at the back of the class, it turns out that an off-ramp has taken off in meaning and is now much more complicated than being just a humble slip road.
Google says that an off-ramp metaphorically refers to a way out of a difficult situation or allowing someone to de-escalate a conflict, or change their plans, or “save face”. It signifies a safe retreat or a change in direction.
So why don’t people use these words instead of, as with much corporate jargon, introducing a level of confusion about what exactly the speaker is talking about?
Well, everyone wants to sound modern and up to the minute and part of the reason for using corporate speak is that people think it makes them sound more professional and knowledgeable.
But the opposite can be true. Your audience may think you are pretentious . Or worse, they will decide you are relying on jargon to hide the fact that you can’t speak clearly because you are not on top of your topic.
Why do I care about off-ramp and its usage?
Well, it’s because it’s part of a growing trend for using new words and phrases which most of us don’t want to admit we actually don’t fully understand.
The curse of business jargon is with us in everyday office life, and it can ruin your meetings and your presentations and media interviews. If you use jargon that people don’t understand they won’t be taking in your main messages. They’ll just be puzzling over your opaque words and phrases, trying to decipher them and not taking in what you’re saying.
When I am training people to maximise their impact in their presentations and media interviews, I always advise clients to avoid jargon words and phrases. They can make you sound not only confusing but also uncaring.
For example, when spokespeople talk in media interviews about ‘rightsizing ‘ their organisation, this sounds particularly weaselly because we all know what they are really talking about is cutting staff and making people redundant.
Similarly, when politicians talk about working ‘at pace’ we all know this probably means ‘we want to look busy so we’re having more meetings about this problem’. For more on the irritating and frankly meaningless usage of ‘at pace’ you can read my blog https://tvnewslondon.co.uk/are-you-working-at-pace/
And it’s not just politicians who cling to jargon
For some excellent examples of the advanced use of civil service jargon, you only have to look at the recent appearances before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee of Sir Olly Robbins, former head of the Foreign Office and Cat Little, Deputy Head of the Cabinet Office, to hear some prize examples of Sir Humphrey’s art of boring people to death with jargon.
Cat Little spoke of judgment processes, decision-making authorities, legal policy propriety advice, iterative processes for information gathering, ethics and propriety teams, and more and more opaque stuff like this. Top civil servants truly are experts in using jargon to say a lot of words which mean little to their audiences.
A survey has revealed that nine out of ten people are confused by corporate speak on a daily basis and would like people to use plain English.
Pet hates include: synergy, leveraging, whiteboarding and let’s shift the needle. There are so many more.
Apparently one third of the two thousand people surveyed admitted they have pretended to understand jargon in meetings to avoid embarrassment.
I’m sure in reality it‘s much more than a third!
