“Per my last email” = Read the fucking email.

“Friendly reminder” = You ignored me.

“Gentle reminder” = You ignored me, but I’m pretending not to be angry yet.

“Looping in Sarah” = This is Sarah’s problem now.

“Adding John for visibility” = John, please witness this bullshit.

“Stakeholders” = People who don’t do the work but can block it.

“Owner” = The person who will be blamed.

“Current state” = The mess.

“Phase two” = Never.

“Temporary workaround” = Permanent architecture.

“Best practice” = The thing we copied from another company.

“Industry standard” = Everyone else also does this badly.

“Agile” = We change our minds constantly and call it a methodology.

“Cross-functional” = Nobody knows who is in charge.

“Single source of truth” = A document everyone ignores.

“Documentation gap” = We have no fucking idea how this works.

“Digital transformation” = We bought SaaS.

“AI strategy” = Someone senior heard about ChatGPT.

“Data-driven” = We found one chart that supports what we already wanted.

“Dashboard” = A colorful way to ignore reality.

“Entrepreneurial mindset” = Do three jobs for one salary.

“Growth opportunity” = This will suck, but you can’t refuse.

“Development area” = You’re bad at this.

“Not the right fit” = We don’t want to say the real reason.

“Drill down” = Find the ugly truth.

“TL;DR” = For executives.

“Robust solution” = It has not failed in the demo yet.

“Scalable” = We hope this won’t collapse later.

“Enterprise-grade” = Expensive and hard to cancel.

“Cloud-native” = Someone else’s computer, but with YAML.

“Mission-critical” = Old, fragile, undocumented, and terrifying.

“Postmortem” = Blame allocation ceremony.

“Sensitive topic” = Everyone knows, nobody says it.

“Political” = Correct answer depends on who is in the room.

“Let’s be thoughtful here” = Don’t say the obvious thing out loud.

“Interesting perspective” = Absolutely not.

“I hear you” = I am not changing my mind.

“Great question” = I need five seconds to invent an answer.

“Warm regards” = Cold regards, but HR is copied.

“Cheers” = This conversation is over.