Sport is a fertile category, what with the awful ubiquity of “close of play”, “deep dive” and so forth. S wim lanesīusiness jargon likes to make itself sound fun by borrowing terms from more exciting pursuits. One anthropologist asked in 1962: “How do we segment the stream of speech into category-designating units?” An excellent question to start any meeting. There are also inspirational examples from other disciplines. And yet, like many apparently modern abuses of language, the transitive use of segment as a verb – “to divide into segments” – dates back to 19th-century biological science, becoming popular in computer programming in the 1970s, which is probably where the business use came from. Overheard by a correspondent on a bus: “We’ve got to segment that down.” How disgusting. How long it will take for us to re-evolve back to a bipedal attitude is anyone’s guess. In any case, getting down on all fours was already advertising jargon in 1950s New York. O n all foursĪre you on all fours with that? Should we get down on all fours and look at it from the client’s point of view? Either this is supposed to be smirkingly pornographic, or implies that the client is extremely small. The term was popularised a decade ago by the Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett, but over the past year it seems that if you’re not busy building a moat, you’re digging your own grave. ![]() But rather than a literal body of water around a castle it is “used to describe products or services that protect a company from incursions by competitors”. According to Bloomberg, “moat” is the mot du jour in Silicon Valley presentations and earnings calls. We have Game of Thrones to thank for the fact that business jargon is adopting language reminiscent of fantasy medieval warfare. These things – like the floppy disk icon that means “save” – will presumably live on until no one can remember what they originally meant. Can’t you just say “file” or “slides”? But of course it makes no sense to use the word “slides” for the individual images in a slideshow: that’s an obsolete tech metaphor from the days of overhead projectors. ![]() People are increasingly annoying one another by asking for the “deck” when it comes to a particular Powerpoint presentation, as though they are card sharks in a New Orleans saloon.
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