Idioms and Idiocy

I guess if you're a "branding specialist" you have to be both corny and corporate. However, before actually meeting a "branding specialist," I never considered how that particular combination (corny and corporate) would manifest itself in a human being.

Then, the other day, I attended a presentation about a re-branding or brand-consolidating initiative my company is undertaking, and as I listened, I could not help but be struck by the outrageous number of idioms that crept into the presenter's speech. When I finally regained the presence of mind to write these down (about halfway through the presentation), here is what I came up with:

Where the rubber meets the road

Don't need to recreate the wheel

Everyone's an expert

The sizzle and the steak (I personally have no idea what this one means, but he said it more than once, so someone must know!)

Very finger-wagging

The cart before the horse

Roll it out (This is right up there with my all-time least favorite corporate-speak terms; it should be used in reference to pie baking and nothing else)

Take the learning and bake it into our process (Not an idiom, but it was such a bad metaphor I had to include it)

And perhaps the best of all:

I'm not going to teach my grandmother to suck eggs

This last one I had to look up on Wikipedia when I got back to my desk. I invite you to do so now.

Please consider all of these constituted only half of his presentation, which was maybe a half-hour long at best. I challenge you, reader, to use all of these idioms (and bad metaphors) in a single day. Your achievement earns you . . . my undying admiration. But isn't that worth having?