There are certain things you just shouldn't do in public. Lick your own armpits, for instance. Or read a Dan Brown novel. Or come out as a Gordon Brown supporter. But perhaps the very worst thing any human being could do in the presence of another would be to mount a defence of business speak.

Management jargon is right up there with the Burmese military regime, British MPs and Annie Lennox's cover version of Shining Light as an intrinsically bad thing, with barely a month passing without someone publishing an anthology of the worst and/or most humorous examples under titles such as The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit: An A to Z Lexicon of Empty, Enraging, and Just Plain Stupid Office Talk, or railing against it, as the Local Government Association did in March when it published a list of the 200 worst clichés, including words and phrases such as “level playing field”, “re-baselining”, “coterminous” and “blue-sky thinking”.

However, at the risk of doing the professional and social equivalent of picking your nose and eating it, that is what I want to do today, by posing a number of questions, including: wouldn't it be dull if we all spoke like the Queen? Is it not significant that a 2006 survey by YouGov on behalf of Investors in People found that 55 per cent of senior managers think jargon is harmless? If we heeded the complaints of the most vociferous whingers and started clamping down on abuse of the language, wouldn't that make us a little bit French? Isn't evolution actually essential to the English language? If the English language never changed, wouldn't we still be going around calling radios “the wireless” and addressing one another as “sire”? Is it really fair to dismiss all business speak with equal vehemence? Some of it, surely, isn't that bad. Certain phrases are quite nice and useful. For example:

1. Glocalisation. Business speak is often castigated for making things sound more complicated than necessary, but this phrase does the opposite, providing easy shorthand for the way in which certain global applications and organisations such as Google, Starbucks and Craigslist nevertheless try to provide highly localised versions of their service.

The phrase probably attracts ire because it is considered a rather naff merging of two words (globalisation and localisation), the linguistic equivalent of those private number plates that attempt to form names out of misshapen numerals and letters. But so-called portmanteau words have a rich history. There are examples to be found in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (for example, slithy is formed from lithe and slimy), scattered throughout James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and in general usage, with examples including brunch (formed from breakfast and lunch), Tanzania (formed from Tanganyika and Zanzibar), Motown (motor and town) and blaxploitation (black and exploitation).

2. 110 percent. It is unclear when 100 per cent became insufficient, but the phrase has in recent years been subject to hyperinflationary pressure, so much so that barely two minutes can pass on The Apprentice or Match of the Day without someone saying they plan to put 110 per cent or 130 per cent or even 2,000 per cent into their work, annoying those who point out that it is mathematically illiterate to put anything more than maximum effort into something.

However, such an interpretation is myopic. The fact is that percentages can and do go over 100 per cent, as Zimbabwe's inflation rate and 120 per cent mortgages have shown, and you could argue that if you were comparing your effort to a normal person's effort, or even your own past effort, then it is perfectly possible to apply 110 or 130 or even 2,000 percent effort to something.

Besides, the infinite variations are more interesting and expressive than plain old 100 per cent. When people in business say they are 101 per cent behind an idea, it immediately raises the question: why not 130 or 150 or 231 per cent? It said something about Labour MP Shahid Malik last week when, in regard to his outrageous expense claims, he protested he did things “one million per cent” by the book. And as comedian Richard Ayoade said in Garth Merenghi's Darkplace — saying you're 110 per cent behind someone means you can backtrack 10 per cent and still be 100 per cent behind them.

3. Outside the box. As jargon, this really pushes the envelope in terms of irritation. According to a 2005 survey, 90 per cent of us have been told to “think outside the box” by bosses at some stage or another, and it usually prompts the complaint: “What bloody box?” But it's no more a real box than the two birds and one stone mentioned in another popular expression are real. It's a metaphor and, in my view, a useful one: too often we get stuck in conventional ways of thinking and it is necessary to break free of parameters. And the box is a powerful motif in business life. Most of us work in offices, which are boxes, those offices are often subdivided into cubicles, which are boxes, and for a great many of us our work involves filling in boxes, whether in Microsoft Word or Excel.

Which brings us to the essential purpose of business speak: it separates our working and personal lives. At home, you wouldn't, unless you were highly misogynistic, ask your wife to “step up to the plate”; or, unless you were highly religious, insist that your kids “sing from the same hymn sheet”; or, unless you were engaging in a bit of DIY, ask your mates to “drill down”; or, unless you had problems in the bedroom, ask your partner to demonstrate “passion”; or, unless you were very rich, refer to your kids' pocket money as “revenue streams”. But lots of us nevertheless use such phrases at work. Why? Because corporate jargon is a way of maintaining a linguistic and psychological work-life balance.

sathnam@thetimes.co.uk

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