Business jargon

[El Gordo]

Hmm, "needle mover" is a new one on me too. I presume the metaphor relates to a gauge of the traditional kind.

I don't remember it being used in The Wire, but I'll defer to Sweder's greater experience (I've watched only the first 3 series, and didn't realise -- or had forgotten -- that there were more). Mind you, given the subject matter of The Wire, I might have expected the reference to be to a different sort of needle.

But yes, The Wire is very great television and should be on the "must see" list of anyone who enjoys vanishing for a few weeks into a boxed set (or box set -- wars have been started over that one), along with Breaking Bad and The Killing (Danish version).

Coming back to needle mover, that does seem like a particularly useless addition to the management lexicon, and therefore I'm delighted to be told about it.

Now that I've been exposed to it, I suspect I'll start hearing it everywhere. It's odd how that happens. Last night, when watching the football, I heard Phil Neville refer to a player's legs as "levers", which I'd not come across before. But blow me, when I turned over shortly afterwards to see what was happening at Wimbledon, I found the commentators chatting about a very tall ball boy (7 ft 1), and one of them referred to the amazing "length of his levers". And then on the Radio 4 sports news this morning, yet another use of the word to describe someone's legs (can't recall the context).

When chatting to a colleague this morning I came across one of those wonderful German portmanteau words that have no parallel in English (e.g. schadenfreude). The erudite Tom Roper would no doubt be aware of "weltschmerz" but it was new to me. Literally "world pain", weltschmerz, according to dictionary.com, means something more than its literal translation:

"...this melancholy word conveys more than its simple portmanteau roots; the concept, coined by Jean Paul Richter, refers to the 'sorrow that one feels and accepts as one's necessary portion in life,' describing a state in which a person feels that their physical reality will never be as beautiful or blissful as the world they can imagine in their head."

A concept with which long-suffering England football supporters will be spectacularly familiar.