Aidan Deshong and Adam Levav move their rears. In a completely innocent and cruciverbal way, of course.
Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky Clues
THURSDAY PUZZLE — I don’t know about you, but I am not a fan of business jargon. I like plain talk, as you can see from this relatively simple, 15-word sentence.
When I entered the corporate world, I was suddenly surrounded by people who spoke what sounded like English but was really a carefully assembled cluster of clichés. The banter in meetings took on the cadence of a postgame interview in which athletes are asked their opinions on how things went.
Executive: “Well, the team was out of the loop for the first quarter, but once we leveraged our core competency and drilled down to the silver bullet, we experienced a paradigm shift and, at the end of the day, succeeded in picking the low-hanging fruit. That’s when the team was finally able to move the needle.”
Boss: “You forgot to use the word ‘synergy.’”
Executive: (Panicking) “Oh my God, I’m so sorry! May I please start again?”
Boss: “No. You obviously don’t have enough buy-in to be part of this team. Put him on the back burner, boys.”
Executive: (Being dragged from the conference room) “Nooo. …”
I bring this up because Aidan Deshong and Adam Levav, the constructors of today’s puzzle, have used a popular business cliché as their revealer, and it is mission critical that we fly it up the flagpole to see what happens, impactually speaking. It’s also so much cheaper than therapy.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
