EVERY SO OFTEN, ONE MUST dare to do the unthinkable, commit a cruelty for the greater good, and seize an opportunity whatever the pain: in short, one must “shoot the puppy”.

“Shooting the puppy” is the sort of graphic phrase that seems to emerge, spontaneously, from the workplace. In an intriguing new guide to modern jargon, Tony Thorne traces it to the 1960s TV producer Chuck Barris, who imagined that the ultimate entertainment might involve seeing how much money would persuade someone to shoot a puppy live on air. “Shooting the puppy” has come to denote a thing that only the toughest executive dares to do.

Such jargon blooms and withers with astonishing speed. A few years ago, everyone was “thinking outside the box”, “running it up the flagpole” and exhorting others to “wake up and smell the coffee”. Today they are more likely to talk of carrying out a “muppet shuffle” (sacking or reassigning junior workers), searching for the “boggle factor” (the must-have element in a retail product), or “blamestorming”, that familiar ritual in which everyone tries to pin responsibility on everyone else.

A few years ago, when a project went wrong, it had almost inevitably gone “pear-shaped”; today it is more likely to be “tanking” or “circling the drain”. (“Pear-shaped” may originate from the shape of a disintegrating balloon, a pregnant or obese woman, or what happens when a glass bubble is overblown.)

Often these picturesque coinages are used by professionals to lend superficial fizz to a meeting, to demonstrate a grip on cutting-edge parlance, or simply to baffle everyone else. I know a venture capitalist whose favoured technique when meeting foreign business associates is to use a Britishism such as “let’s not get our knickers in a twist”, in the certainty that it will utterly confuse and probably intimidate them.

New jargon often involves animal imagery. “Kicking a dead whale up the beach” is a task that is boring and unpleasant but necessary, as in “I have been trying to get Whitworth in accounts to do the new spreadsheets for weeks, but it’s like kicking a whale up a beach.” “Jumping the shark” is the moment when a project has reached a tipping point and is going downhill. The “pig in the python” is marketing-speak for a historical bump in consumer spending caused by the baby-boom generation. “Whose ox gets gored?” is a way of asking who would suffer from a course of action. “It’s like herding cats” is a way of complaining when others won’t do what you want them to do when you want them to do it.

We have all experienced a “salmon day”, though we may not know it as such. It has been spent toiling upstream, through waterfalls and cataracts, only to be killed, gutted and eaten. A similar experience is “boiling the ocean”, used to describe a task that is time consuming, boring, ultimately impossible and entirely pointless.

One of the best recent workplace coinages is “truthiness” – something that is a good tale, but may not actually be true: a course of action based on feeling rather than reality. Tony Blair’s decision to go to war to recover weapons of mass destruction that did not exist was based on truthiness, rather than truth, a gut feeling in the Prime Minister’s soul. On the other hand, Blair would probably argue that with Iraq going pear-shaped, someone had to shoot the puppy.

Shoot the Puppy: A Survival Guide to the Curious Jargon of Modern Life by Tony Thorne
Penguin, £7.99

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