Words and Phrases to Ban

Those of you prone to business-speak, those of you who need to talk about money and sales and markets, please pay attention.

If you are discussing, say, the size of the market for a particular category of software — PC games, for example — and it has increased, you know it is growth in the market. If it has not increased (as is the case with PC gaming, which appears to be losing out to consoles) you can describe that as “flat” or as “no growth” or as “not much growth at all.” If it goes down, like graphics software has, (apparently people are satisfied with what they have, and/or get it free with their cameras), for crying out loud, do not call it negative growth.

Now, I admit it’s not as easy as all that to figure out what to call it. You can’t call it a loss, because it isn’t: we’re talking about less money coming in, not money actually going out. Nor can you call it “shrinkage,” which is already reserved for theft of physical products somewhere between manufacture and consumer (that is, the sum of product lost to assembly-line workers taking a few home, boxes “falling off the truck,” and shoplifting). You can, however, call it a deterioration, decline, decrease, or a falling-off. Any of those is vastly preferable to the abomination that is “negative growth.”