Worst corporate jargon of the week: Circle back
Offender: Circle back
Every one of us has been on an email chain which is borderline unintelligible for the amount of corporate lingo thrown in there. At City PM, we’re taking a stand and calling out the worst jargon which travels around the City faster than you can drink an overpriced pint. This week: circle back.
What does it mean?
To come back to something at a later date. Its use skyrockets during the festive season, with pushing tasks into January a modern but much favoured Christmas tradition.
Who uses it?
While we suspect it may have roots in government, circling back is currently unconfined by sector and roams free across the City with the same boundless confidence as a graduate in a gilet. Lawyers, bankers, consultants, accountants and journalists alike are insisting we circle back like there’s no tomorrow. But tomorrow will come and the issue at hand will remain unaddressed.
More concerningly, circling back is equally favoured by incumbents of two diametrically opposed groups for two diametrically opposed purposes.
In the red corner we have the time wasters and OOO idlers, for whom circling back is a critical delaying tactic. They use the term only in the future tense. The issue at hand is pressing, but these laggards will not be dealing with it today, or ever – if they can get away with it.
But hark! In the blue corner, their nemesis: the corporate keeno. Without a doubt, this breed of City slicker would like to address that issue right now and will be proposing circling back today. Combat ensues.
Should we be worried?
Undoubtedly. For our affable slackers, things may all be very well now, but the New Year will come around. After a Christmas break of uninterrupted seething, your industrious adversaries will be sending emails with vigour your way come January, and with them a gargantuan list of problems you agreed to circle back on in happier yuletide days. Oh sweet December child.
As sure as the sun will rise, you will take their ‘just circling back to this’ and counterattack with a ‘let’s circle back to that next week’ – but who really wins? As Sisyphus pushes his rock up the hill eternally damned by the gods for trickery, so too will the circle backers ultimately suffer.
What could it be confused with?
- Part of the cha cha slide
- A circus trick
- Mr Happy’s hindmost
- An American football hunk
How do we get rid of it?
Squaring the circle is never easy, but readers we must persist. Triangles, rectangles, dodecahedrons, hexagons, throw whatever you’ve got at these circling menaces and do not back down.