Eggplant, zucchini and an Australian

Continuing on the 'North American' theme: one of the dishes available in our staff canteen today is the American English-sounding eggplant and zucchini pasta bake – that's aubergine and courgette pasta bake to Brits like me.

Actually I believe our head chef is Australian, and that 'eggplant' and 'zucchini' are the favoured terms in Oz. Either our chef is unaware of some of the differences between Australian and British English, or he is trying to stamp his authority (and nationality) on the menu...


(Read my other staff canteen-related posts: pan-fried cat and fine herbs.)

Australian business-speak

It looks like business-speak isn't limited to the US and the UK: Roz has written in with some examples heard during a one-hour 'Dialogue Day' session at the Australian Taxation Office. Here they are, with Roz's comments in brackets.

• Key drivers

• Key deliverables

• Key strategies (why can't they use some synonyms for 'key'?)
  

• ...sessions around delivery plans (whatever happened to 'about' or 'regarding' or 'concerning'?)

• At the end of the day

• Cascade down corporate messages (well, cascades don't often go up do they?)

• Efficiencies made to business (how do you 'make' an efficiency?)

• Big ticket item

• Co-design session

• Impacting on all the messages out there

• Hip pocket

• Value-adding

• A deliberate service model (what – as opposed to an accidental one?)

• Sophisticated profiling and risk

• Level playing field

• The tax agent community (yeah, there's probably an axe-murdering community too. Everything has a community these days)

• Principles-based

• Penalty 'safe-harbour'

• Grass-roots issues

• Base tenants (I think the $120,000-per-year idiot meant tenets)

• Capability-building projects

Thanks for those, Roz. 'Level playing field' is one that often appears in our publication; we hear all sorts of gubbins about 'communities'; and 'impacting' is one of my personal bugbears. So I feel your pain...