Sometimes clarifying metaphors or terms just add more confusion.

I remember the first time that I heard the term full court press in a business context.  I’m not a basketball fan, so I hadn’t heard it used before.  In the context of the E-Mail in which I discovered the term, I deduced that this was a metaphor for sustained effort to achieve a business objective.

Obviously somewhere in my education I had forgotten to brush up on  (let alone play) sports as a means of business communication.  Every industry or even business function develops its own shorthand and constructs acronyms at a speed that multiplying rabbits would envy.  Businesses model themselves after the military or competitive sports teams, so it’s natural that terminology carries over from one realm to another.

One sport that I do (or did, haven’t followed it for awhile) know something about is baseball.  (Aside:  I don’t know much about hockey, though.  I worry that the government will revoke my passport and transfer my citizenship to some other country, but so far they haven’t.  After all, Canadians have the hockey gene, right?)  I know a bunch of terms about plays, statistics, tactics, and so on.

When I started to see the term inside baseball being used a lot by some people on Twitter (largely used by PR, communications, marketing and social media folks), it took me a little longer to pick up on what they meant by that.  I eventually did figure that out.  Inside baseball originally meant a kind of baseball strategy which focused on keeping the baseball in the infield (if the three bases and home plate of a baseball field form the shape of a diamond, then the infield is the area within that diamond shape) so that various players who had positions in the infield could collectively work together to prevent the other team from scoring runs.

But look at this:

Inside baseball – a description of this metaphor from Wikipedia:

The expression “inside baseball” is sometimes used as a metaphor for details or minutia of a subject so detailed that they generally are not well known by outsiders.

You would conclude, then, that inside baseball is used when people catch themselves speaking in the jargon of their industries and need to use more generally known language to make their point to outsiders.  As in:

“Talking about conversions, PPC, whuffie are too inside baseball – we need to speak to the general public.”

I find this amusing, though, because a number of people will just use the term inside baseball and then not explain it.  Therefore, outsiders like me have to figure out what they really mean.

In an ironic twist of fate, the term inside baseball becomes, in fact, inside baseball.

Next up (someday) on Broadcasting Brain:  moving the needle.  Is this a term used by:

• dentists
• race car drivers
• social media marketers
• heroin addicts
• audio engineers
• or accupuncturists?

Don’t touch that dial!