Language can be a powerful weapon in the workplace.
But sometimes, without necessarily knowing it, you shoot yourself in the foot with it.
Here are 5 words and phrases you've been getting wrong in the office your whole life. Don't be too embarrassed, it happens to the best of us!
1. Irregardless
This is a stone-cold classic - and one that seems to have taken off thanks to our friends from across the pond. Those pesky Americans - first "aloominum", and now this.
Either say: regardless or irrespective - you can't mash both words together.
2. Exasperated
Exasperated is a perfectly good word, but the problem is a lot of people get it confused with the word "exacerbated".
Use "Exasperate" when you're furious and use "exacerbate" when someone or something is making a problem worse.
Although semantically there is some logical relationship, the two words don't mean the same thing.
3. Escape Goat
Don't laugh, we've genuinely heard this said before.
The phrase is "Scapegoat", deriving from the ancient practice of a community laying its sins upon a goat and sending it into the wilderness.
We're not entirely sure what an "Escape Goat" would entail, but we just can't shake the image of someone escaping blame by quickly hopping on the back of a goat like it's some kind of getaway vehicle and riding nonchalantly into the sunset.
4. For all intensice purposes
This seems like a phrase that is simply confused for something similar-sounding.
The correct phrase is: "for all intents and purposes", but it's likely that people mishear the phrasing for the similar but not-quite-sensical "intensive purposes".
5.Tender Hooks
This one is arguably the most forgivable, chiefly because nobody really knows what on earth the correct version means.
"Tenterhooks" is the accepted phrase, apparently referring to a hook used in Victorian times to fasten cloth while it dried.
But given nobody has used a tenterhook in about 150 years, we're almost inclined to let anyone who says "tender hooks" off the, uh, hook.