In the workplace more so than anywhere else I imagine, someone uses a word or expression — often inelegant, sometimes a solecism, other times cute – in a particular situation and it becomes the de facto lexical standard for analogous situations from then on. Cases in point currently:
- agreeance, as in “Are we in agreeance?”;
- visibility, as in “What’s the visibility on this process?”;
- heads-up, as in “I just wanted to give you a heads-up on this before you met with the client”;
- offline, as in “Can we take that offline?”, which means “Can we not talk about that in this meeting?”;
- socialise, as in “Has this process been socialised throughout the team?”; and
- consume, as in “Who are the consumers of this document?”.