'Ping you', 'Circle back', 'Put a pin in it': Survey says GTA employees in Oshawa, Markham, Vaughan, Brampton, Mississauga use slang that 'annoys' them

Slang terms are ubiquitous but ever-present in office culture, as many say they use them to "fit in."

Durhamregion.com
Jan. 31, 2024
Tim Kelly

If you’re fed up of a colleague who says he’ll “ping you” or “circle back” once we’ve done a “deep-dive," you’re not alone.

It seems corporate jargon is overused and thoroughly annoying to many residents, even though a new report by the language learning company Preply that surveyed more than 1,000 Canadian recently shows 88 per cent use these trite sayings every day.

In addition to being clichés and buzzwords with little specificity, such terms as “get your ducks in a row," “put a pin in it,” “piggybacking,” “at the end of the day,” as well as “above and beyond,” are apparently only understood to mean anything concrete by about 22 per cent of Canadians.

It turns out Oshawa employees use corporate lingo the most in the GTA, an average of about 8.8 times a day, with “piggybacking” -- using the work of others or an already finished task to build on your own -- their favourite. When asked why they used the terms, employees said “to fit in” in 46 per cent of the cases, but they also responded 26 per cent of the time that “it makes them feel annoyed or confused.”

The ”piggybacking” term was also popular in Brampton and Richmond Hill, which also likes “wear many hats” -- ie. do more than one thing or multitask, to coin another reviled term -- as well.

Markham went for the dreaded “ping you,” which is another term for get back to you/contact you/speak to you, while “circle back” was a popular choice in

Toronto and Vaughan. Instead of “circle back” why not just "contact you" or "talk again."

And employees and Canadians definitely have a preference for the lingo they can tolerate and what they really abhor: If there’s one term everybody would love to see disappear it’s “ping you," closely followed by “get your ducks in a row,” with “put a pin in it” coming in third.

Least annoying terms, or maybe those most tolerable for those who use and hear them, were: “window of opportunity," “unpack," and “out of pocket," which nobody likes to be in practice or hear spoken.

Whatever your terminology or language usage, it’s clear these buzzwords aren’t going away any time soon -- until of course they’re replaced by new ones.