Camille Rapacz: Welcome to the podcast today is going to be a ranty podcast.
If you just want to have a little laugh and a giggle with George and I, then this is the podcast for you. Today, we're going to talk about catchphrases because the work world is just full of them. There's catchphrases or mantras, or I don't know what you want to call them. Catchphrases, I guess is the right thing.
We use them so much in business. And for some reason today, I was just feeling especially annoyed by them and actually annoyed by my own use of them. I was just annoyed at me, the consultant, using my dang catchphrases. So I just want to be a little ranty about that today. What do you think, George?
George Drapeau: I think that's great.
I think it's funny hearing about your catchphrase autoimmune system attacking you.
Camille Rapacz: Yep, that's what happened.
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful business.
I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
George Drapeau: Let's do this! Bad catchphrases and lazy language are a pet peeve of mine. It's actually a problem because if I take it as seriously as I want to, I can turn into that guy at work who's like critiquing people on their slight misuse of vernacular or lazy use of some of these phrases when most other people in the room don't give a damn.
But I do want to spend some time ranting with you about the problems with these. And I will say, see I'm already ranting. I don't want to admit this, but there's a reason, there's a good reason people use these catchphrases. Mostly not, Mostly it's laziness, but there is some good reason that people do some of this stuff.
I would say. Have you thought about that?
Camille Rapacz: Yes, so let's talk about that first because okay We are probably talking to a bunch of people right now who are listening I'm saying a bunch all five of you a bunch of people who are listening And are like, oh boy, I think I do this And so i'm just here to tell you the reason i'm doing this podcast is because I do this You And I want to check myself on the use of these terms all the time.
Nothing worse than a consultant who comes in and just uses catchphrases, and then you wonder, do they actually know what they're saying or talking about? But there are good reasons to do them,.
I have one, I'm going to say one, and then I want to know what you think, George.
George Drapeau: Okay. So
Camille Rapacz: one reason I think these can become useful is that if it's a good one, you can mean a lot of things in just a short few number of words,
so it can be a helpful shortcut in conversation. Not every time do I want to have to give a two sentence explanation about what I want, but if we have the same agreement on what this term means, then it's a good term.
George Drapeau: That was my reason too. It's common ground. Okay. Thanks. If it's, if it's common vocabulary, I have a Star Trek reference to try this, by the way.
Camille Rapacz: Oh, please do. I mean, we haven't had a Star Trek reference in many episodes. So go.
George Drapeau: One of my favorite Star Trek, The Next Generation episodes is called Darmok the Enterprise comes across as a little race and the Universal Translator works when whatever the other people saying sounds like poetry.
I was saying Dharmak, his eyes black, his face red, or Timba, his arms open. All talking in these weird poetic phrases and they're trying to figure out what is going on and they can't figure out what's going on. And they're in conflict, they're trying to resolve some conflict and they're shooting at each other.
And the other ship ends up taking Picard and their captain and beams them down to this planet. Where Picard has no idea what's going on, it turns out the whole race speaks through metaphor. That's all they do is they, they do nothing but this.
All of their communication is through common lived experience historically. And it's a, to me, it's a beautiful episode and you get to see how Picard and the other captain are forced to spend time fighting this weird enemy, and it brings them together. And however, fire they're telling stories to kind of build up their own shared language.
It's really, really great. It's what happens when this works at its best.
Camille Rapacz: But we are not super advanced alien beings. And so we often don't do this very well at all.
The other reason I was thinking that this can be helpful is extending a nice common language that we're using is it, it kind of gives you this sense of belonging.
We're in the same clubhouse because we have our little catchphrases that we use together. It creates this little sense of connection and community if you're doing it well.
George Drapeau: Yeah. That's a good reason.
Camille Rapacz: So yeah, that can be a good reason. But most of the time, many times we just overuse these terms.
And sometimes when people say them, I wonder, do they even know what that means?
George Drapeau: Yeah, I agree with that. I have another reason for this where I think it starts out good and it's helpful, but it crosses the line and it becomes annoying or unhelpful. And that is if you're a person who doesn't have great public speaking skills or are not a naturally great verbal communicator, but you're in meetings a lot where you have to communicate verbally, you could latch onto a lot of these common business phrases or common phrases that people understand, and it can help you.
Because you may stumble around creating your own sentences from scratch in real time, but you can lean on some of these things to kind of make connections and sound more business fluid than you really are. And that's, I think, fine as a start, but if you rely on nothing but those as a crutch, then you just become this stream of pablum or stream of catchphrases.
And that turns people off. That's when you lose credibility with people when it's nothing but that. Even though you might have valid thoughts behind you. If you haven't learned how to speak in more than just this, that's when it jumps the shark.
Camille Rapacz: Oh, another catchphrase. Good job.
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: I didn't even have that on my list. I agree with that. I think if you use these sparingly, then okay, but if it becomes your whole language then you start to lose the substance of what you're talking about. And then people can also stop trusting that you actually know what you're talking about.
George Drapeau: Yeah, absolutely. That's a big problem.
Camille Rapacz: All right. So let's just talk about some of them. Yeah,
George Drapeau: let's do it.
Camille Rapacz: I'm going to say one and then I want you to say one.
George Drapeau: Okay.
Camille Rapacz: You can come up with whatever ones that come to mind. So my first one on my list, I want to, yeah, I'm going to just go with the first one, which is the think outside the box.
Now, we like the idea of creativity and innovation, which is like what this means, like think outside the box. So what might be my problem with this one? How does this get overused?
George Drapeau: I think it's not actionable. I think It helps convey the idea that you want to be creative, but then for somebody who's not being creative, it doesn't really help them figure out how to get there.
That's my thought.
Camille Rapacz: I think outside the box kind of reduces down the challenge of innovating. Like, innovation is difficult to do.
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: Having genuinely innovative ideas is not easy to do. It's very hard to do. And when we say, think outside the box, it just sounds trite and just do that.
George Drapeau: That's true.
Camille Rapacz: And then I also think it gets applied to not innovative thought like, Oh, we were just thinking outside the box. Could also just be like, no, you were just being contrarian. So if I'm just thinking differently from you, it wasn't an innovative thought.
It was just a different thought. I say that I just, I can cover it up by saying, I was just thinking outside the box. And so any of these phrases can get weaponized. And so that's where they start to go bad is, Oh, now I'm just using it as a defensive. I was just thinking outside the box. What's wrong with that?
Can't blame me for that. Like, no, you were actually being a jerk.
George Drapeau: That's true. I'll do one: at the end of the day... that's one. Somebody to say at the end of the day, then the concept they wanted to say, and I think most of the time they didn't need to say at the end of the day. And most of the time they're not using it right.
Like to me, well, shall I tell you what I think at the end of the day truly means, or do you want to do it?
Camille Rapacz: No, I want to know what you think it means.
George Drapeau: If you're saying something at the end of the day, you're making this strong literary metaphor to, you've put in a lot of thought or something big long day has happened.
Many events have happened at the very end of it when it's time to just relax, reflect, sum up, think about something you've thought about everything that's Happened and then you say your conclusion or whatever. But most people when they say at the end of the day at the end of the day, it's all about synergy, whatever it is about communication.
Like, well, how did you get there when you're trying to say it's all about communication? You don't get to just say. At the end of the day, when you didn't tell us the steps that got you to it's all about communication. If you're going to say it's all about communication or what it's all about teamwork.
It's all about thinking outside the box. Then I need you to justify at the end of the day. I need you to tell me the different ways that you consider there. You don't get to just use at the end of the day for free if you didn't earn it.
Camille Rapacz: Yes. And you know what? When, now that you say that, when I hear somebody say at the end of the day, it to me sounds like what they really want to say is the right answer is
George Drapeau: yes.
Camille Rapacz: It's a nice way for them to say nothing else that anybody said here matters. What I'm about to say is the only thing that matters.
George Drapeau: Yeah. You stop thinking. I'm just telling you.
Camille Rapacz: Yes, it's very passive aggressive now that I think about it.
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. Okay. People don't use that one. That's a bad one. At the end of the day, unless you really
George Drapeau: mean it.
Camille Rapacz: But the whole point is to shortcut and if you have to back it up, then you've done the opposite. Oh, that was a good one. Okay. I like that one. I know. Oh my gosh. Getting so fired up. All right. What's another good one? I want to pick from my list here.
I guess I'm going to go with, I haven't used this one.
But I hear it used a lot. And I wonder if you do too, which is you already did use it. Actually synergy. Does anybody even know what that means when they use that word? I mean, it's a cool sounding word. Like I sound smart when I say it, Very synergistic. But what the heck what are we talking about?
George Drapeau: Here's what happens when I was so right. I think a lot of people don't know. And then sometimes somebody will call somebody's bluff and say, what would you mean by synergy? And the next statement out of their mouth is. Oh, you know, where one plus one equals three, like, that's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for that one plus one equals three kind of thing like, okay, you just pissed me off even more.
That didn't really help.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. And I think, you know, when I hear it used, I hear it used to mean, we're in agreement or we're in alignment or like there's a bunch of other words that you could have used to mean more of exactly what you meant. Then synergy. Okay, so I'm going to look this up to get the actual definition of synergy.
So synergy, the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects. I think when people use this term, they rarely mean that.
George Drapeau: Yeah, I think you're right. They rarely mean that. The problem I have with one plus one equals three is people focus on the three.
They're not focusing on what's the magic that happens when you're combining these two things. There's a lot of work you have to do when you're taking two separate things and you're trying to find What's the interplay that we could discover here that we didn't naturally think about? That's what the fun part of synergy.
That's the magic. You ending up getting something than the individuals combined is great, but it's really hard. Get to that. So that's why things are synergistic or not.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. So it's a cool word and it actually means a cool thing. We just misuse it a lot.
George Drapeau: Yeah. Right. A lot.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. Okay, people. So watch out for your use of the word synergy.
Make sure you mean it. Your turn, George.
George Drapeau: I'm going to hate myself and have to, the five people in our audience are going to hate me for saying this. So decimate, the synergy reminds me of that. This is probably not a good one for this, but I'm going to just say it because it's just a pet peeve.
So, people use the word decimate to mean to almost completely eradicate, but it's literal meaning is to erase 10%. When the Romans decimate in their armies, deci, deci mean one tenth, 10%. like decimeter. It mean the Romans would take one out of ten out of their legion and get rid of them. Decimate means to give it ten percent, which is not that bad, depending on, it's not like, oh, they were decimated.
When you hear that, you compute people usually mean iron, like, and most of them are gone. Nope. so it's like synergy. It's used to convey something other than what it really means. And that just nerves me so much so that I have arguments or No, not arguments. I have coaching from my wife, who is training as a linguist, and one of my good friends, Ellen, who has training as a linguist, who both say, George, you'll be happy if you just get over yourselves and realize that words change their meaning over time, and informal meanings come to dominate, and it's okay.
Camille Rapacz: That's true. Words do change their meanings, and that's part of what, you know, Is happening with this right as we were inventing new phrases and meanings for things, but the challenge is that in the process of doing it, they take on varied meanings, depending on the group that's using it. And that's where it becomes unhelpful.
George Drapeau: Yeah. You're like, just going back to what you said at the beginning of the whole point of these things is they can bring us together. They give us common ground and right. That's subverting their value. Yeah. Yes.
Camille Rapacz: So we sound like we belong or we sound like we know what we're talking about when maybe we don't and we need to, look like we fit in.
But if we're not, if we don't all mean the same thing by these phrases, then we're getting in trouble.
George Drapeau: Your turn.
Camille Rapacz: Okay. Let's talk about low hanging fruit.
George Drapeau: Okay.
Camille Rapacz: So I have used this phrase. I kind of like this phrase because, you know, it can be really important to just say, let's not overcomplicate things.
What's the low hanging fruit. Let's go after that first. But I think sometimes it can overly simplify what we really need to do. Cause even the low hanging fruit can be very challenging and require some, serious effort. Whereas it just sounds like it's a little dismissive, like it was just go after the low hanging fruit.
George Drapeau: Oh, I see. Yeah, actually that's how I think about it. So I, you know what, when I hear the whole, the phrase low hanging fruit, I often actually visualize The ling bloom farm across from our house where we grew up, you know, where there are all those apple trees and there are cows in the field and there are a lot of those, there's nobody picking those apples.
So there were a lot of apples in the trees that were really just right there and practically fell off. That's what I think of usually when I hear this phrase low hanging fruit and program and they're the easiest ones to pick or they already fall.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, absolutely. And that can be I mean, I think that that is why that term makes sense,
because these are the easier things to get at. But it doesn't necessarily mean that we should dismiss them as easy.
George Drapeau: Right.
Camille Rapacz: Being easier than other things doesn't necessarily mean that they themselves are easy. They're just like, we can get to these the quickest. We can get to these with the least amount of investment.
We can get to these, the least amount of effort, these things being inside a business goals or. Yeah. Yeah. So sometimes we can say that and just be like, so you should just be able to wave a magic wand and make it happen. I think it can keep you from really thinking through, okay, well, what's it going to take to actually get at those?
Your example, I still might need to get a ladder. to get up and reach for a cow Sure. However you grew up.
George Drapeau: I
Camille Rapacz: that's where I think it can sometimes be feel a little bit because I, sometimes I'll hear people say, okay, well, yep. We got the low hanging fruit. So, okay.
So we got those done. Let's move on. I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. There's still some planning and some discussion to have around what we do with this low hanging fruit, how we go after it. That's why I think we can sometimes go astray if we use that phrase in that way. Instead, if we were literal about this, what would we be saying?
We'd be saying something like, okay, let's go after those goals or action items that will require the least amount of time, effort, resource. What are those? And then we would define the time effort resource to go get them and go do it. And then we would move our way up the ladder of complexity.
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: It's also not always the right place to start.
George Drapeau: But it's so appealing, so tempting.
Camille Rapacz: You can get stuck in there just working on the low, like we're, we're not done. We're still working on the low hanging fruit. And then you never do the hard stuff, which is the stuff that will actually move the needle. Because some of that low hanging fruit it's about to spoil.
George Drapeau: Yeah,
Camille Rapacz: it's going to go bad in a day. It's not actually going to do what you wanted to do for the business or it's not going to do enough. It's not even worth the investment. It just feels so easy. And it's just so tempting. Like I just got to go do it. But I think assessing like, should I go for this little hanging fruit or would I be better off starting to go for that?
higher hanging fruit, I guess. Which is not a term by the way. Oh, we don't use that. Should we coin it? No, we should not. All right, so that was mine, low hanging fruit. I kind of like it, but also, eh, be careful.
George Drapeau: Yep. This is fairly recent for me, and I, I don't know, maybe I'll change over time, but the, this construction, it's blank until it's not, like, oh yeah, it's, hey, that's funny until it's not.
Or it's it works until it doesn't. I hear this phrase a lot and my problem with it is like I get it like you're going along and things are okay okay and then something happens and all of a sudden that's not okay and then the whole world changes then things are really bad. Fine there's I get that concept but when I hear it I want to hear what happened to make it not? Like, it's funny till it's not?
So like, that doesn't help me. Yeah, it's funny till it's not. Okay, well, what caused it to be changed to not? Are you going to tell me that? Or are you just going to leave that up in the air for me? I want to know. And because I'm not hearing. anything about what's changing it, I get frustrated at hearing the phrase, it works until it doesn't.
Like, well, of course things work till they don't, or of course things are funny till they're not funnier. What information are you delivering to me right now? So this is probably me just being kind of extra unish about it, but I do not use this phrase myself. And I don't like hearing it.
Camille Rapacz: I never really thought about it that way. It is a completely meaningless phrase. It adds zero value. it's like water is wet.
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: It works until it doesn't. Of course. But I also feel like, so if you're going to use that phrase, I also feel like that gets into that passive aggressive.
What you really want to say is this is not going to work or this no longer works. Like that's really what you want to say if you're using that phrase.
George Drapeau: Absolutely. Like throwing endless amounts of stimulus money into the economy sometimes has to be done. But if you keep doing that, at some point it becomes too much and you overload the economy, you got too much money.
And so you could sum that summarize that by saying stimulus works until it doesn't like yeah, I know that but I don't think I needed that way of summarizing the situation, and I deserves deeper conversation than just stimulus works until it doesn't like okay. Bonehead.
Camille Rapacz: It's a really horrible way to communicate about a solution because a solution will solve a specific problem.
So the stimulus one is a really good example, because that was to solve a specific problem at a specific time. If you have solved or began to solve that problem with that. Then yes, eventually that solution, any solution to any problem can start to work against you, become a problem of its own if it's resolving the problem it set out to resolve in the first place.
Because then that solution may no longer be needed. And that's the example of stimulus. Like, well, it did work to solve the problem when it existed. The reason it doesn't work anymore is because that problem does not exist.
Or that
problem has been minimized, so it's no longer applicable.
George Drapeau: Yeah, that's great, exactly right, yeah.
Camille Rapacz: It's kind of a lazy way to say that. Which, I mean, I get why we do it, because what I just said was a lot of words. Ha ha
George Drapeau: ha, yeah, I get it too, but when you really think about it, It doesn't really convey much information and it's not helpful. What I don't understand is like, if you go back to the principle of the beginning, how does this give us common ground?
How does this give us a common vocabulary to talk about something? I don't know. I guess it's supposed to convey the concept. Temporary measure, maybe?
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. I mean, I think instead you just want to say, is it still working? Do we still need this solution for this problem?
Or do we need to rethink our strategy?
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: That's really what you're trying to have the conversation around. George is sending me a thumbs up bubble on zoom. So thanks.
George Drapeau: Okay. So that was mine.
Camille Rapacz: Oh, that was a good one. Okay. Now I feel challenged to come up with a really good one. These are all
George Drapeau: all star when I'm looking at the notes, they're all all star phrases.
Camille Rapacz: That's true. Okay. Here's one that really bugs me. I do not use this one, but this is a big one in leadership. Don't bring me the problems. Bring me solutions. I hate that one.
George Drapeau: That one doesn't bug me as much, but I, so why does it bug you? I just, I don't think it's great.
Camille Rapacz: It bugs me because what I really want organizations to do is talk about problems openly. And this is shutting that down.
George Drapeau: I don't want you to not talk about,
Camille Rapacz: I want you to talk about problems before you've got solutions. Just talk to like solve openly together, brainstorm. But that makes it sound like, nope, I don't want to hear about them until there's actually a solution.
And I think that's a horrible message for leaders to send.
What leaders should say is Great, bring the problems and let's start solutioning. Like start that process and coach them on how to do it. But this just turns it into like, oh, I can't tell the boss about any of the problems until I have some answers for them.
That's just a horrible way to lead. Don't do it, people. Don't do it.
George Drapeau: I'm going to speculate how this got to be this way. You know the thing when you're coaching people how to talk to executives, and they haven't done it before, and they're used to talking amongst their peers, so they're talking about problems.
They work it out in a peer group for a while. They don't have much power. So then they ask for somebody to help them, or usually they're asking a mentor or their manager or their team leader or something. Can you help me figure out a solution to this? Because they haven't done it much before. They're still learning.
One of the things you say to people about how to communicate to executives is they don't have time to solve your problem for you. They want to be making decisions about your recommendations. So you do mostly want to outline there's a way outline the situation and tell them your recommendation and give them enough information to them for them to quickly and efficiently decide yes I will go with that thing that you recommended which is bring me solutions. Bring me solutions, options of which I can approve one for you and it's and this is a cheap way of it's not quite capturing that right but I bet you that's where this Comes from like some executives, what they really meant to say was, Hey, look, I don't have time to solve your problem, but if you tell me, describe the problem and your recommended solution, I will approve your solution.
I can imagine some executives, certainly not by say, don't bring me any problems. You know, I don't want to solve solutions. What do you think about that? Yeah, there's a theory.
Camille Rapacz: I do think that that's exactly where it comes from. I think one of the other reasons that this happens is because I know for sure that leaders are out there having problems brought to them that they feel compelled to solve for their people.
George Drapeau: Oh, really?
Camille Rapacz: And they're not coaching them on how to solve them themselves. What they mean is don't bring me problems to solve for you.
I want you to solve them. That's really what we want. But this shortcut of don't bring me problems, bring me solutions has just turned into don't talk about problems.
Only come to me when you have a solution, which is not what we want. You should want your employees to come and, say, I'm working on X, Y, and Z issues. I don't have any solutions yet. Great. Maybe you can offer them some coaching tips. Maybe they don't need it on how to go solve the problem, but you don't take that problem on. And that's on you, not them.
And so that's why I kind of don't like this phrase is it's putting the onus on the employees to stop doing it. Instead, it's you, the leader that needs to change your behavior.
George Drapeau: It's a leader badge. You're right. Absolutely. Whatever leader first originated, this phrase needs to be found, identified and fired.
Camille Rapacz: So that was mine. Don't bring me problems, bring me solutions. No likey, no likey that one. All right. Do you have one more?
George Drapeau: One of them, I don't feel that strongly bad about it is: Hey, we're all rowing in the same direction.
That one's on the fence for me. It's like a little bit too simplistic that it's kind of triggering my catchphrase antibodies. But on the other hand, rowing in the same direction has strong connotations of being in alignment. We all know where we're going. We're pointing in a way and we're coordinating with each other.
George Drapeau: And I like that about it. So that's on the fence for me.
You have one here. Don't rock the boat, which is another boat analogy. I don't like don't rock the boat. I don't think that's really helpful at all. It's all rolling the same direction here, folks. I see equal parts of good and annoying in it.
Camille Rapacz: I could see that. I like the visual of row in the same direction. Like I think that anything that evokes a visual that's positive and gives the message that you want to give is good. I don't want to row in the same direction because otherwise this boat's going nowhere.
That makes sense.
George Drapeau: It's helpful.
Camille Rapacz: It is helpful. Okay. It's just used so often it's become
George Drapeau: annoying to me. That's I guess what it is. Yeah, that's
Camille Rapacz: true. I do think that that's part of the challenges. Some of them like you just have heard them too much. But.
Sometimes we have some good ones.
Not so bad. Yeah.
Do I have one more that I want to do? Maybe I'll just read a bunch of them. Okay. Great. Yeah.
So there's the ends justify the means.
Nope. That's all I want to say. Oh,
George Drapeau: this is a catchphrase lightning round. Okay. Yep.
Camille Rapacz: Work hard, play hard. I feel like that's a tech bro thing. Yeah. That's like hustle culture that I hate. So nope. No, thank you.
Fake it till you make it.
This one's tough. I think it's overused. and misunderstood. I do think that there's like a first time you go in to do something, you do feel like you're kind of faking it. It's your first time that you're speaking in front of a group or doing whatever it is you're doing. But man, some people do this and you can totally tell they're faking it and they're never going to make it.
George Drapeau: Here's, here's what I think the problem is. It's well meaning and we have to find a better way to Let's talk about people who suffer from imposter syndrome, which is most women and a lot of people in general. And for people who you need to help with imposter syndrome, it's helpful to tell them like, trust me, most of us have imposter syndrome.
You're just not seeing it. If you did this, if you could just take a fake it till you make it attitude, that's going to serve you better than you think. But this is not the right way to explain that, but it's useful to tell people don't worry so much about feeling like an imposter. Just do, just do your stuff and have a little bit more trust.
That's your, you're going to get there. Even if you feel like you're not quite who you are in the role, you feel like you're faking it. You're actually doing it. That's a, fake it till you make it doesn't quite get there.
Camille Rapacz: But it just rhymes. So, you know, that's why we use it.
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: That's kind of all I want to say. Okay. There's other like one worders like unpack, ping, wheelhouse, bandwidth, oh, they're so exhausting and I've used all of them and I hate myself for it.
George Drapeau: So I use ping all the time in with other tech people because it's a networking term.
Well, actually it's not a networking term. I mean, it's, I guess it's submarine term. It's a sonar term, but it's used heavily in computer networking. And so within the tech culture, ping is a nice way of saying, you know, I'm going to contact you or reach out to you. It's fine text line, but I don't use it Outside of Really.
Like, I won't really say I'll ping you, even though we've known each other literally our whole lives.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. No, you would never say that to your sister. That would be weird.
George Drapeau: But
Camille Rapacz: I did literally just go to Red October. One ping facility. One
George Drapeau: ping.
Camille Rapacz: Give me one ping. One
George Drapeau: ping only.
Camille Rapacz: One ping only.
George Drapeau: Yeah. Oh man. And I use bandwidth.
Although I'm actually, my wife and I use bandwidth with each other all the time. And that is a shortcut that we find helpful. I'm trying to think why I don't find it annoying because this is an annoying one. Although, again, within tech culture. it's fine because bandwidth is a tech laden term. And so I don't have a problem with it within that, context.
Unpack. Yeah. Wheelhouse. Ugh.
Camille Rapacz: I know. I mean, cause wheelhouse, you could literally just replace that with one other one word, which is skillset. So
George Drapeau: yeah. Specialty.
Camille Rapacz: Bandwidth, capacity.
George Drapeau: Yeah, exactly. It's more descriptive and more precise. It's a better word.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, but we just decided we now need other words.
George Drapeau: That's the problem with those. These are jargony words where there's an actual English word that describes that as succinctly and better.
Camille Rapacz: Yes, what's wrong with those words? Why did we have to pick new words? Lazy. I feel like now I want a linguist to come in or is that who would that would that be the right expert a linguist to come and explain to us why we decide to replace words with other words?
George Drapeau: I'll ask my wife. She would know the answer to this. Okay.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. I'll ask Ellen. All right. We'll make her be on the podcast one of these days.
George Drapeau: I have a couple that I'll add. There's a personal pet peeves. But these are word usage things, not like, so target when you mean aim, we're targeting this audience.
When you talk to somebody who shoots bows and arrows, they don't target the target. The target is the thing they're aiming at. The aim is the verb. That's right. Yes. Another thing for me is the use of the word granular, which I've lost this battle, but everybody else in the world, when they say granular, they mean fine grained.
But to me, granular just, it means made of grains. So my first question is, well, are they coarse grain or fine grain? That's what I want to know. It just means grainy. So usually to me, the opposite of grainy is smooth. So when I hear granular, I hear, Ooh, it's rough, which is more coarse than smoothing.
But that's not the common usage right now. I am definitely in the minority here. And so I don't talk about it except on this podcast now.
Camille Rapacz: But see, this is my point is that we all can interpret these differently.
So they don't necessarily evoke the right thought emotion feeling behavior.
George Drapeau: I can tell you for a fact that when there's some executive that says, let's be more granular about this discussion here.
When I say, excuse me, do you mean more fine grained or coarse grained? That is a career limiting move. That is not good for me to say that.
Camille Rapacz: That's true. And you're fired.
George Drapeau: Okay. Nerd. Why?
Camille Rapacz: Yes, actually, if you did that to me in a meeting, I would probably go, Oh, I'm not One of those guys.
Okay. Yeah, exactly. We're gonna have a conversation on the side 'cause you are slowing us down. .
George Drapeau: Yeah. Architect instead of design. This is used in computer stuff all the time. People say, I architected that software in this way. It's like, well if you talk to the kind of architect who builds buildings and you ask 'em what they do, did they say, I architected a house?
No.
They
say, I designed or I built a house. Yeah. They don't say they architected architects. Don't architect.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. Not used as a verb.
George Drapeau: Yeah. It's not used as a verb.
Camille Rapacz: Yes. I've lost that battle too.
George Drapeau: It's too bad.
Camille Rapacz: Ah, I know. But it's such a cool word. We want to use it in all the ways.
George Drapeau: Makes you sound important.
It's now more important. Sophisticated than design. I don't know why. But this does somehow.
Camille Rapacz: Yes. I just thought of a bunch more. Circle back.
George Drapeau: Oh.
Camille Rapacz: Hard stop.
Tipping point.
George Drapeau: Tipping point.
Camille Rapacz: Close the loop. In the weeds. Deep dive.
George Drapeau: They're all shortcut words that had use, but when you, if you do nothing but that, You're making your people's brains tired.
Camille Rapacz: I know. We're trying to come up with a whole other language. This was one of my challenges when we were bringing Lean into organizations is, literally there were Japanese words to describe things we needed to describe, and I was like, why are we teaching people a foreign language while we do this?
And it was that circle of, We wanted to have people feel like there was this way of running the business that we all had a common language around. I'm like, we can do that without it being a foreign language. Use like English words. Yeah. Very interesting.
George Drapeau: That is fascinating. That's hilarious. I know
Camille Rapacz: it was very cute.
All right. That's all I wanted to do today. I just wanted to talk about catchphrases and rant about them a little bit because I was hoping it would help me cleanse my own palate and get some of these words out of my own vocabulary so I don't overuse them. So thanks.
George Drapeau: I have a call to action.
Camille Rapacz: Yes.
George Drapeau: The call to action is if you've heard some of these things or if you feel like you use some of these things and you're convinced by us that it's not always good, think for a moment about what you're trying to communicate when you're about to use this phrase.
And try to use plain non vernacular English instead. So like I said, we're going to deal with the low hanging fruit. Say, hey look, I think what we should do is go after the simplest problems first, or whatever you're going to say. Whichever you're trying to do. Not low hanging fruit. Try to, stop yourself when you're about to say the term.
And substitute Maybe a longer but a plain simple English phrase instead.
Camille Rapacz: Yes, I think that's great because you have to remember any one of these phrases, you might think you know what you mean by it, but other people might have a different interpretation. And so using an actual English. normal words, like George just said, that is actually a shorter shortcut than trying to use these shortcuts.
George Drapeau: That's the call to action.
Camille Rapacz: All right. So good luck with that, everybody. If you have catchphrases that we did not call out that are your pet peeves, we would love to hear about them. So you can leave us a voicemail, go to the belief shift. com and you can hit the little voicemail widget and leave us a message about it.
We'll bring it up on the podcast. If you leave us one.
George Drapeau: Make our blood boil.
Camille Rapacz: Yes. Do it. Do it. Or make us laugh or whatever.
And if you would like to work with a consultant who is on a mission to not use catchphrases, you can book a call with me, CamilleRapaz. com slash book a call all the links in the show notes.
All right. This was fun, George. Thanks for ranting with me a little bit.
George Drapeau: Thank you.
Camille Rapacz: Thanks everybody for listening. We'll be back in your ears next week.
George Drapeau: See you folks.
