Go ahead, drop the towel!
Impress your coworkers with these sexy new protoclichés.
Now that our overlords are recalling minions to their cubicles, you’ll want to avoid the tired old office clichés. Instead, try the fun replacements below. I call them protoclichés—expressions that have yet to wear out their welcome.
The word cliché comes from the French term for a stereotype block. When a typesetter inserted the letters, leading, and “furniture” into the block, it made a clicking sound. Printers would keep the most common groups of letters together to save work. Share this block of knowledge with your clique!
Air-kiss: Insincere praise. “They just air-kissed our presentation.”
Anaerobic: An unsustainable pace, as when a sprinting athlete goes into oxygen deprivation. “Whoa, slow down! This meeting is getting anaerobic.” See terminal velocity.
BCE: Best Christmas Ever. An expression of ironic optimism. The OIC orders a series of “stretch goals” requiring limitless hours of uncompensated overtime. Mutter your response with a rictus smile: “You’ll see…BCA!” (See OIC, EWA.)
Board of the Flies: Dysfunctional governance.
Brazilian-wax: Verb for painfully reducing staff to a whisker. “The Washington Post is getting Brazilian-waxed.” See Ozempic, mullet staffing.
Brototype: An employee recruited right after your company drops its DEI guidelines.
Drop the towel: To operate transparently. A substitute for “open the kimono,” an all-kinds-of-wrong Wall Street expression. Drop the towel adds a locker-room aroma while keeping the creepy sexiness. “Before the investors catch up, let’s drop the towel on this crypto.” (See yoga pants deadline.)
Eat the worm: To overdo it, as when a drunk swallows the larva at the bottom of a tequila bottle. “You worked all weekend? Dude, you ate the worm!” (See anaerobic.)
Embrace the suck: To welcome the pain and difficulty of an impossible task. I stole this from Cross-Fit. My pal Steve Madden wrote a popular book with that title.
EWA: Enough With the Acronyms, pronounced contemptuously as YOU-ah. (See my post on SLAP, the Society to Limit Acronym Proliferation.)
478: Calm down. From the breathing technique advocated by Andrew Weil (inhale for four seconds, hold for seven, exhale for eight). “Hey, chill! 478!”
Ground-truth: A substitute for “due diligence” or “fact-check.” In satellite imaging, ground-truthing means to confirm the accuracy and interpretation of satellite imagery. I often use this one to make me sound competent. “Let’s ground-truth this survey.”
J6: Verb for the leader’s pardon. “Yeah, I groped the new intern. Come on, J6 me, Boss!”
Masculine energy: Label for a stupid comment made with absolute confidence. OIC: “You all need to work smarter, not harder!” You: “Masculine energy!” Kudos to he-man Mark Zuckerberg for this Zeitgeist-worthy phrase. (See OIC.)
Mickey-You’re-So-Fine: “Mickey” for short. An obsequious employee who says things to higher-ups like, “Your idea blows my mind!”
Mullet staffing: Too few front-line workers, too many in the back office.
OIC: Oligarch-in-charge. (See EWA.)
OMS: Oh My Stars. A substitute for both the Third-Commandment-violating OMG and the positively obscene WTF. Let’s clean up our virtual and IRL spaces, people! (See EWA.)
Ozempic: Euphemistic verb for slashing the budget. “We need to Ozempic this program down to size.” Extra points if you can ironically substitute Ozempic for red-pill. (See Brazilian-wax.)
Sniff the cork: To review a dubious proposal.
Terminal velocity: The state of working as fast as we can before we hit the ground. Terminal velocity is the maximum speed an object attains as it falls through the air. Since “hitting the ground” in this respect implies a rather poor outcome, it’s best to use this protocliché ironically. When the OIC says, “Let’s do this at warp speed,” you reply with feigned sincerity, “We’ll attain terminal velocity asap!” (See OIC.)
Train the bot: To craft a brilliant piece of content that inevitably ends up in some large language model. “Get writing! Train the bot!”
Yoga pants deadline: Tight and transparent. (See drop the towel.)
Got any juicy cliches-in-waiting? Eat the worm! Gin some up and send them to me.
Sooo many future classics here. Keep going until you have enough for one of those word of the day calendars. I'm going to pace myself and try to use one a week.