Sink or swim. A new person is put in the water and must find a way to stay up. Nobody holds them.
Hit the ground running. Be productive from the first day, without a period of settling in.
Learn on the fly. Learn the work while already doing it.
Figure it out. A common answer when a new employee asks how something is done.
Rightsizing. A company cuts jobs and calls the result the right size.
Restructuring. Jobs are cut as part of a new design for the company.
Leaving to pursue other opportunities. The standard announcement when a manager is pushed out.
Transitioning out. An employee is on the way out of the company.
Parting ways. Both sides agree to end the relationship, at least in the announcement.
Slow-walk. Delay a task on purpose while appearing to work on it.
Drag one’s feet. Move slowly because one does not want to do something.
Pay lip service. Say that one supports something without acting on it.
Flavor of the month. A new program from management that people expect to disappear soon.
Wait it out. Do nothing until the change goes away.
In The Great Gatsby (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald explains where Jay Gatsby came from. “James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career.”
His parents were farm people, “shiftless and unsuccessful.” Fitzgerald writes that Gatsby’s imagination “had never really accepted them as his parents at all.” Then he gives the line that readers remember: “The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.”
“Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.” The advice is often credited to the newspaper editor Horace Greeley. Nobody has proven who first used the phrase in print.
One story names John B. L. Soule and an 1851 editorial in the Terre Haute Express. The phrase does not appear in any 1851 edition of that paper, and the Soule story goes back to a satirical account from 1890. Greeley himself denied giving the advice.
In 1948, the first year the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey asked the question, 20.2 percent of Americans had moved in the past year. In 2021 the figure was 8.4 percent. The Census Bureau called it “a new historical low.”
The share of Americans who move each year has fallen by more than half.
On December 15, 1973, President Richard Nixon signed the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act. The law put the country on daylight saving time through the winter. It took effect on January 6, 1974.
A University of Chicago survey found that support for year-round daylight saving time fell from 79 percent in December to 42 percent in February. On October 5, 1974, President Gerald Ford signed an amendment that cut the experiment short.
The Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution sets the day and the hour when a new president takes over. “The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January… and the terms of their successors shall then begin.” The amendment was ratified in 1933.
A new president takes power on a date that everyone knows years in advance.
Americans who buy health insurance through the federal Marketplace can choose or change their plan once a year, during a period called Open Enrollment. For coverage in 2027, it begins on November 1, 2026.
A change at any other time needs a reason. HealthCare.gov explains that “life events or changes may open a Special Enrollment Period.” Its examples include “getting married or having a baby” and “moving or going away to school.”
American car makers have traditionally introduced a new model every year. One history of the industry explains the logic: “Now cars would have to be sold almost entirely to current car owners.”
The industry answered with what was “benignly called annual model changes and which critics termed ‘planned obsolescence.'” Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors often used another term, “dynamic obsolescence.”