Working like a dog to coin a phrase

Green weenie? Clown pile? Companies produce enterprising lingo for office life

By Sherry Slater

The Journal Gazette

So you think business is boring? Then you obviously aren’t tuned in to the latest business jargon, phrases colorful enough to put a fully decorated Christmas tree to shame.

Suppose a project would take a huge amount of effort with very potential payoff. If you’re up on the latest lingo, you’d compare the project to “milking a mouse.”

You’ve got to admit, that mental picture says it all.

Or suppose some legal, accounting or other problem rears its ugly head only after an acquisition closes. Business hipsters call the nasty surprise a “green weenie.” The phrase comes from the idea that if you’d bought a used refrigerator that had been unplugged for awhile, you might get it home and find a moldy hot dog rolling around in the crisper.

The image is both disgusting and oh-so-vivid.

Ron Sturgeon defines those and about 1,200 additional terms in his new book, “Green Weenies and Due Diligence: Insider Business Jargon – Raw, Serious and Sometimes Funny.”

Sturgeon, who also wrote “How to Salvage Millions from your Small Business,” started collecting interesting business words, phrases and definitions after entering negotiations to sell his six-location recycling business to Ford Motor Co. He’d stumbled onto a foreign language.

Some of the phrases are pretty familiar. Who hasn’t heard someone refer to a slightly sloppy performance as “close enough for government work”?

We’ve all heard of brainstorming – sitting in a meeting, throwing out loads of ideas in an effort to find one or two workable ones. So it isn’t too much of a leap to figure out what a “blamestorming” session is all about: trying to find a source for blame for the most recent company failure.

And after Enron and similar accounting fraud cases, most of us are familiar with the term “cooking the books.”

Some local business types have their own colorful phrases.

Nancy Wright, president of Ferguson Advertising, said the creative types in her Fort Wayne-based shop can throw around some creative language as well.

For example: “Clown pile.” That’s when too many people get involved on a project and nothing good comes out of it – or nothing happens at all. Sample: That committee turned the project into a real clown pile.

When the Ferguson team makes great progress on a project, they say they’re “diggin’ where there’s taters.” The image calls to mind a gardener who wouldn’t have much luck trying to dig up potatoes in an area where none was planted to begin with.

But when the team is working way ahead on a project, before their true objectives are defined, the staff says they’re “making mud pies.”

Phil Laux, president of the Greater Fort Wayne Chamber of Commerce, hears more than his share of jargon. It’s not uncommon for an ill-fated project to be described as “DOA,” or dead on arrival, he said.

Other projects that have little likelihood of success, Laux said, are said to have “about as much chance as a snowball in hell.” Not great odds, to say the least.

Mary Fink, director of tax and benefits for Steel Dynamics Inc., said her co-workers favor an acronym that speaks to the realistic trade-offs in today’s business world: “TNSTAAFL” (pronounced: tan-staff-ful). It stands for: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Workers at the Fort Wayne-based steelmaker also use the term “greenmail,” which refers to a corporate acquisition strategy for generating lots of cash. The maneuver falls into the “hostile takeover” category.

Sorin Matei, assistant professor of communication at Purdue University in West Lafayette, said humor has historically been used to “tame difficult situations.”

“Individuals and groups have advanced to the conclusion (not entirely rational or conscious, but almost religious and unconscious) that if you use humor in certain situations, those situations will somehow become more malleable, more ‘humane,’ ” Matei said in an e-mail.

So that’s why folks would rather talk about “milking a mouse” than express their despair at tackling the nearly impossible task ahead.

Enough serious talk. In the mood for more insightful instances from the book? Here we go:

•Company cholesterol – refers to “the buildup of information, staff or other bottlenecks that impede a company’s ability to perform.”

•Changing the tires while the car is going down the road – refers to a company’s effort to plot its next steps before the results of earlier steps can even be measured and reviewed.

•Don’t change the dog food without talking to the dog – this guideline reminds companies not to try to sell a “new and improved” product if they aren’t sure what the customer really wants.

•Chips and salsa – computer talk: chips means hardware, salsa refers to software.

•Meatloaf – refers to unsolicited forwarded e-mail from friends and relatives, similar to spam.

•Bee with a bone – refers to someone who is obsessed with something that’s out of his league and none of his concern. Imagine a real bee trying to carry a bone, and you’ll get the idea.