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Day’?s Verse:
A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones.
Proverbs 14:30
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Some things you never hear outside of work, terms that range from company- and even group-specific to industry-wide. These terms form a seemingly impenetrable wall for new hires, who have to learn almost a new language as they join the workforce at their new company. Charles River Labs is no different; acronyms abound, and are often strung together to form strange and incomprehensible phrases. Examples of these acronyms include:

SOP – Standard Operating Procedure
LM – Laboratory Method
FR – Final Report
DR – Draft Report
FRA – Final Report Amendment
BAC – Bioanalytical Chemistry
CRL-MA – Charles River Laboratories, Massachusetts

Those and other acronyms I expect. They come with the job. Unexpectedly, though, I began to encounter certain phrasing or word usage that I had never seen before but seem endemic to my workplace. These phrases and odd usages include:

X and Y, respectively.
Per Y’s request…
The X of Y has been Z (and other rampant unprotected passive tense use, often combined with wordiness – a potentially dangerous combination)
Random Inappropriate Capitalization
QCing (and other verb-izing of acronyms)

I think I will keep adding to this list as these usages occur. What are some strange phrases, words, or acronyms you encounter only at work (or what passes for work)?

One thought on “Workplace Phrases and Words

  1. I’m not going to bother listing acronyms because there are so many where I work. My favorite though is RXS which stands for REX Software which can be further expanded into Receiver Exciter Software.

    Since we do software development in the code we abbreviate words, but then we pronounce the abbreviations. For example, Waveform is often shortened to Wfm which is then pronounced as “woof-em”.

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