Annoying office cliché began in the space race
Iwas at a meeting yesterday where one guy seemed only to talk in clichés. He rattled them off, one by one – “thinking outside the box”, “touch base”, and “blue sky thinking”. Each one set my teeth on edge, but the one that really annoys me the most is “pushing the envelope”. I mean, what kind of envelope are we talking about, Queries Man? – J. I can only sympathise, as these clichés annoy me, too. “Pushing the envelope” is a phrase that came to prominence after it was used in Tom Wolfe’s 1979 non-fiction novel, The Right Stuff. The book follows Navy, Marine and Air Force test pilots who were involved in aeronautical research at Edwards Air Force Base, California, as well as the Mercury Seven, the seven military pilots who were selected to be the astronauts for Project Mercury, the first manned spaceflights by the United States. The expression comes originally from mathematics and engineering, where an envelope is a boundary. That envelope is the description of the upper and lower limits of the various factors that it is safe to fly at, such as speed, engine power, altitude, manoeuvrability and wind speed. By “pushing the envelope”, testing those limits as far as they could, test pilots were able to determine just how far it was safe to go. And the Seven certainly did, piloting the manned spaceflights of the Mercury programme from May 1961, to May 1963. They were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton.