The man and woman in the street are fed up with blue sky thinking outside the box, and feel that running it up the flagpole will not result in anything cutting edge.

Moving forward, this cutting edge paradigm is unlikely to be actioned or benefit from a roadmap.

In a survey of the most hated business phrases, conducted by s-commerce platform blur Group, Brits made their feelings clear: and red-flagged the worst offenders.

The top 10 most hated expressions are:

• Outside the box
• Blue sky thinking
• Run it up the flagpole
• Brainstorming
• Level playing field
• Paradigm
• Cutting edge
• Action it
• Moving forward
• Roadmap

When it comes to technology phrases, terms such as “deployment”, “portal” and “elasticity” are widely understood – if not liked – but people are still cloudy about cloud computing; – 20 per cent of the public don’t fully understand what it means.

Even under anonymous survey conditions, respondents were so keen to display a working knowledge of tech that many claimed to know about “zoomblogging”, a made-up phrase. Asked to provide specifics, 60 per cent of those surveyed admitted they did not know the actual meaning of the word.

Hearteningly, 75 per cent said that they would ask during a conversation if they were unclear on a specific term, 10 per cent said they would smile, nod and look the term up later, and only 7 per cent said they would feel stupid.

“If one fifth of Brits aren’t fully sure of what the cloud is, it’s little wonder that the b2b sector is taking significant time to embrace the possibilities of today’s technology and innovation,” says Philip Letts, CEO of blur Group.

“The only way to tackle that head on is to help customers feel comfortable with learning and experiencing cloud-based applications.”

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