4/30/2023 0 Comments Time out meaning![]() Why does anyone have to reach out merely to get in touch with someone? Why can’t you just contact them? I suspect this is not quite what the originators of this term had in mind. Reach out suggests to me an almost-drowning loser grasping unsuccessfully at a life-saver ring. On the Hot To Write Better website, their article on Do you speak Touchy-Feely? writes: It won’t make me like you any more, so stop it. There’s no need to use such ridiculously emotive language, especially if you’re emailing me for the first time and that we’ve never met before. Why they can’t just say “I am contacting you because?”. You think they want to touch you, literally. They want to say they are getting in touch. Given today’s global economy, with businesses doing more and more international trade, you’re probably no stranger to receiving speculative emails saying something along the lines of: “Hi there! I’m reaching out to you in the hope that….” This one seems to be popular with American workers. In fact, only “blue-sky thinking” outranks it: Whereas Forbes Magazine put the phrase at position ⁷⁄₃₂, at ’s site for Tech and Language News, “reaching out” made it to the #2 slot in their article on Business Language - is it all just mumbo jumbo?. Never use “reach out” when “email” or “contact” will do just fine. “Reach out to me by phone?” Seriously? How about just “call me?” In an age when most people are overwhelmed by crowded email inboxes, it’s best to be brief and clear. The English language already has lots of useful words related to communication. “Reach out” is one of the best examples of how corporate jargon makes things unnecessarily complicated. “If you want to follow up, feel free to reach out to me by phone.” “Let’s reach out to someone in accounting to get those numbers.” Just don’t say you’re doing it, because all that meaningless business jargon makes you sound like a complete moron.Īnd here from the Daily Muse’s Business Buzzwords to Banish from Your Vocabulary: The next time you feel the need to reach out, shift a paradigm, leverage a best practice or join a tiger team, by all means do it. A dramatic way of saying a very mundane thing."I'll have my people reach out sometime next week."Īnd here from Forbes Magazine no less, in their now very famous and frequently cited page of Most Annoying Business Jargon or via this link of the most annoying, pretentious, and useless business jargon, where reaching out made it to position #7 in their 32-bracket run-off: But keep any interaction to a phone call or email just to be on the safe side.Īnd here, from the Ridiculous Business Jargon Dictionary: But you can "reach out" (but, again, no touching) to a co-worker for information, support, or to start one of those crucial conversations. For this one, we can blame those old AT&T ads that encouraged folks to "reach out and touch someone." Obviously, you can't actually reach out and TOUCH anyone due to your company's stringent sexual-harrassent policy. There are lots of web pages excoriating its promulgators.įor example, John Smurf’s MBA Jargon Watch defines it as follows: “Reach out” is just so much mindless business twaddle.
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