industries

Watch your language part 3

The corporate world often seems to have its own dialect that only the people who use it really understand. Or do they? Here we attempt to decode three popular business terms

By Felicity Stone /

A field guide to business jargon and buzzwords

The corporate world often seems to have its own dialect that only the people who use it really understand. Or do they? Here we attempt to decode three popular business terms.

1. wheel•house

“One of the big problems is economy and jobs, and that is my wheelhouse.” (Donald Trump, in a speech given April 19, 2016.

The primary meaning of wheelhouse is a structure containing a big wheel, though not of the Donald Trump variety: it especially refers to a ship’s pilothouse where the captain is in control, steering a course at the wheel. In the 1950s, wheelhouse slid into baseball jargon, meaning the spot over the plate where a batter is most likely to hit the ball out of the park, so to speak–and from there has made its way into general speech to mean the area where a person, or business, excels: in Trump’s case, the economy and jobs, apparently.

2. tranche [from tranche: slice (French)]

“The suggestions comprise a first tranche of ideas.” (The Canadian Press, October 20, 2016)

French for a slice of anything, in English tranche originated as an investment term for a type of security that’s chopped up and sold in portions. Tranche invaded mainstream consciousness during the subprime crisis, via constant news reports on worthless tranches of mortgage-backed securities. Though still mainly a financial term, tranche is now being used to describe everything from polo demographics (“an exclusive tranche of China’s society is taking a liking for the sport,” Time, July 2016) to oil production in the Niger Delta (crippled by “a tranche of attacks by a variety of militant groups.” Newsweek, August 2016).

3. dis•rupt [from Latin rumpere: break]

“Banks can use fintech to disrupt their costs.” (Globe and Mail, Dec. 31, 2016)

In 1995, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen introduced the theory of disruptive innovation, whereby a smaller company with fewer resources successfully challenges an established business by providing low-end customers with a “good enough” product or creates a new market. Twenty years later, Christensen complained that disrupt was being used too broadly, to describe any situation in which an industry is shaken up. Or even a situation in which an industry wants to shake things up–take last December’s Disruptive Healthcare Conference in Wisconsin. It was formerly called the Digital Healthcare Conference. ¥