Boardroom Bingo: The Game of Horrible Office Jargon
Writer Mark Strauss wrote an amazing article explaining the etymology of popular office jargon complete with amusing alternative meanings. We loved the article. In fact, we made a game out of it.
Boardroom Bingo is a fun way to endure company meetings by tracking patois and parlance, palaver and pabulum. You win when you hear (or useābut don’t!) five idioms across, down, or diagonally. And of course, you already have the Free Space.
Each word has a funny definition from Mike Strauss or the writing and recruiting teams here at ProEdit. And please share your own funny definitions of office jargon using the hashtag #BoardroomBingo.
Enjoy hunting for office jargon!

Here’s an excerpt from Mike Strauss’s ‘Letās Take This Offline Where We Can Brainstorm a Little More Outside the Boxā: Where did all this office jargon come from? A condensed etymology.
āThis is in our wheelhouse.ā
What it means: āWe would be good at this.ā
What it really means: āWe need to prove weāre good at something.ā
Origin: The Oxford English Dictionary defines wheelhouse as āa structure enclosing a large wheel, e.g., a water-wheel; specifically a house or superstructure containing the steering-wheel, a pilot-house.ā As Daily Finance writer Bruce Watson observes: āItās easy to see why the word has captured the popular imagination: wheelhouses are small spaces with excellent visibility, where the skipper is in control of the boat and prepared to face any dangers that it might encounter. In a wheelhouseā¦. a boatās pilot can practice his ācore competenciesā in an area with lots of blue ocean and the opportunity for plenty of āblue-sky thinking.āā
Bonus fact: Watson argues that āwheelhouseā entered the business world via baseball, which borrowed the nautical term to describe the heart of a hitterās strike zone.