Definition

Short for representative, because politicians and salespeople alike are too busy to say the whole word. In fitness, it's one complete exercise movement; in politics, it's the person supposedly speaking for your interests in government; in sales, it's whoever's trying to meet their quarterly quota by calling you during dinner. The context determines whether you're counting them, electing them, or avoiding their calls.

Example Usage

My sales rep promised the software would solve all our problems, much like my congressional rep promises to read the bills before voting.

Source: Common business and political terminology

Related Terms

Intermediate

risks

All the things that could possibly go wrong with a decision, quantified and documented so someone can be blamed later. In corporate settings, they're identified, assessed, mitigated, and then ignored until they become actual problems. Finance professionals love calculating them with impressive formulas that provide false precision about fundamentally unknowable futures.

💼 Corporate / Business
Intermediate

professionally pissed

The art of being absolutely furious while maintaining a customer-service smile and corporate-appropriate vocabulary. It's the workplace emotion equivalent of a pressure cooker where you're simultaneously boiling inside and perfectly composed outside, waiting for happy hour to finally vent.

💼 Corporate / Business
Advanced

hygiene factors

Basic workplace elements that don't motivate employees but cause dissatisfaction when absent, like adequate salary, clean facilities, or functional equipment. They're the vegetables of job satisfaction—necessary but not exciting.

💼 Corporate / Business
Beginner

expiry

The death date printed on products, contracts, and opportunities, after which they transform from valuable to worthless faster than you can say 'statute of limitations.' In business, it's the deadline that separates the procrastinators from the unemployed. That milk carton date that everyone ignores? That's expiry's less serious cousin.

💼 Corporate / Business
Beginner

Take It Offline

A polite way of saying "this conversation is derailing the meeting and I want you to stop talking." The offline discussion that follows has a survival rate of roughly 3 percent. The rest die quietly in someone's inbox.

💼 Corporate / Business
Intermediate

pragmatic

The approach favored by people who want to get things done without getting lost in theory or idealism, though in corporate speak it's often code for 'boring but functional.' A pragmatic solution is practical and realistic, which makes it the antithesis of most startup pitch decks. Being pragmatic means choosing Excel over the sexy new tool because, well, Excel actually works.

💼 Corporate / Business

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