Business terms
A few weeks ago I subscribed to the daily email from Businessdictionary.com. Every day, they send me a business term. As a struggling editor, I thought this might help me understand the words. Or should I say: “enable me to be better able to further my understanding of a whole raft of business words and phrases”?
So they started to send me definitions for business terms and I didn’t understand any of them – even after I’d read the email. The first was ‘current dollar [or any other currency]’.
This turns out to be:
“The present purchasing power of a currency.”
Seems simple enough until you read on and try to understand how historical costs are adjusted in inflationary periods – and then try to get your head round how this is done.
But then, after a long day’s hard editing – and at a time when I was feeling particularly defeated by business speak – I found in my inbox an email with a definition for the word, ‘copy’.
My spirits rose immediately. Here was a word I understood. I could even follow all three of the definitions given in the Business Dictionary. But perhaps it was because ‘copy’ – at least in the sense of ‘advertising’ and ‘internet’ – is a word that I frequently use. Nagging doubts kept me awake for most of that night.
When I woke, I rushed to my computer and waited impatiently for it to load up all its thingies. No email. I could hardly keep my mind on my work. I found myself ignoring bad sentences, leaving them as they stood, sentences like:
“Statements were released around natural windows of media debate.”
I felt weak, abandoned, and then at seven minutes past five the next business term came through: ‘equipment’.
If you think this story is going to end happily I’m afraid you will probably be disappointed.
Yes, ‘equipment’ is fine and the definitions were clear and as they should be. But it was when the definition for the word ‘job’ came through a few days later that I realised I had been cruelly deceived.
For a start, if you’re not familiar with the word ‘job’, you are hardly likely to follow the term ‘homogenous tasks’ which – while being a perfectly accurate definition – contains two words that are much less common in every day, plain English.
My suspicions were roused. Was Business Dictionary insulting my intelligence? Or is it that business people are stupid?
The latter seemed most unlikely. After all, business people have managed to position themselves pretty much as the rulers of the modern world. And just because their systems are collapsing and Planet Earth is on course to spontaneously combust, doesn’t mean they weren’t pretty clever to obtain all that power.
No. It seemed clear that they were doing this on purpose – taunting me. They probably send most people definitions for ‘repo rate’ and ‘macro environment’. I shouldn’t have given them my details. They must know who I am, that I write this blog. They’re out to get me, torment me, the conspirators…
