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Introduction
Sometimes at work it can feel like things are happening really slowly. Pippa and Phil talk about some common business jargon that is used to talk about delays and priorities at work.
Vocabulary
put something on the back burner
pause a project
park something
leave something for now
put a pin in something
pause something, but remember it for later
put something off
delay doing something, possibly because you don't want to
kick the can down the road
delay dealing with a problem rather than solving it
kick something into the long grass
delay dealing with a problem in the hope that people will forget about it
Transcript
Note: This is a transcript of a spoken conversation and is not a word-for-word script.
Phil
Hello and welcome to Learning English for Work and our special series all about business jargon. I'm Phil.
Pippa
And I'm Pippa. We've been talking about the strange words and phrases we use at work that not everyone understands, and today we're focusing on the ways we talk about delays.
Phil
Yes. You can visit our website for a transcript of this episode to read along with. That's bbclearningenglish.com.
Pippa
So, Phil, sometimes it can feel like things are happening really slowly at work.
Phil
Yes, it can be frustrating, can't it? If you've got an idea you really want to get started on but maybe there's not enough time, there's not enough space, there's other more important things.
Pippa
Yeah. Or you've got something you're really passionate about and you're in meetings and you just feel like other people are delaying it. They don't want you to, kind of, get cracking on your idea.
Phil
And we're going to look at some common jargon phrases that are used to talk about delays.
Pippa
Yeah. So, the first phrase we have is to put something on the back burner. Do you know what that means, Phil?
Phil
It sounds like something to do with cooking.
Pippa
Well, I think it actually is. So, if you think about your stove, your place where you cook things, a stove or a hob, you have hot rings in the front and then you might have a smaller ring and that's the back burner. So it cooks things more slowly.
So, we're using this metaphorically. So, if we put something on the back burner, we're putting it somewhere it's going to cook more slowly. So, it's the things that are less urgent or important, if you're going to stop making something a priority for example.
Phil
Yes, there's another one we've got here, to park something. And yes, it is what you do with your car. Of course, if you park your car, then you leave it somewhere and you don’t do anything to it for a while. And with work it means the same thing. You leave it, and you don't do any work on it for now, maybe you come back to it later.
Pippa
Yeah, so if you were in a meeting and you were talking about a project and then your boss said "Oh, I think we’re going to park that project for now", that means we're not going to do any more work on it at the moment.
Phil
The next one we've got here is, to put a pin in something which is about remembering something for later. I don't know, maybe like pinning something to a notice board or in your calendar or something.
Pippa
Yeah, so, when we put a pin in something we mean we need to, kind of, remember it. We need to know that it was important. So people might say this if they're having an interesting and useful conversation at work and then something else gets in the way. You know, maybe somebody calls or there's a meeting. And the idea with saying let's put a pin in this is that you pause the discussion, but you remember what you were talking about so that you can talk about it later. So it's only a small delay unlike the other phrases that we've talked about.
Phil
Right, now a lot of these phrases have got this idea that you might return to something later. So, they’re often used like this. Although they could also be a polite way of telling you just to stop working on something and maybe you're not actually going to go back to it in future.
Pippa
So it's difficult to know whether you ever will return to something. If… if I say, oh, put a pin in that idea Phil, come back to me later about that, I might actually mean, oh, actually can you just focus on what I've asked you to do.
It's kind of difficult to see and these are kind of some of the nuances we get with using this kind of jargon.
So, that's some phrases that are often used to pause work on certain projects or ideas, but we also have a few common phrases to talk about a situation where delays keep happening, Phil.
Phil
Yes, maybe sometimes you just put something off, and that means to delay something. And we often put something off because we just don't want to do it.
Pippa
Yeah, that's a really common phrasal verb. So you could say I'm going to put that off until later. It means you just don't do it for now.
Another phrase we have that we've actually talked before about on this podcast is the idea of kicking the can down the road. So, if you kick the can down the road, instead of solving the problem, you just delay dealing with it.
So the problem doesn't go away. You just kick the can down the road, but you'll have to probably deal with it later.
Phil
And while we're talking about kicking, you can also kick something into the long grass. And that's similar to kicking the can, except we use this when we think someone's delaying something and they hope people will forget about the problem. It’s in the long grass. No one can see it.
Pippa
Yeah. People sometimes use this when they're talking about politics as well. So they might say that a politician is kicking a problem into the long grass and they're just hoping maybe that nobody notices and it's not going to become a problem in the future.
Phil
Do people use strange phrases at work, you'd like to understand better? Or maybe there's some business jargon that just drives you mad. Email us at learning.english@bbc.co.uk.
Pippa
That's it for this episode of Learning English for Work. Next time, we'll talk about the jargon for success at work and there's quite a lot of it.
Pippa
See you then. Bye.
Phil
Bye.
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