This is the latest entry in a series that examines business buzzwords, helps readers understand them and offers alternatives.

You are about to use a popular business buzzword in your report when you realize you don't really know what it means. Or where it comes from. So you begin to get nervous that someone might dare you to define the expression.

When this happens, my best advice is to skip the fuzzy buzzword and say what you have to say in plain English. But if you are stubborn and like the way the buzzword sounds, here are some crib notes that might help you sound more plausible than your challenger.

Paradigm shift

I don’t know about you, but I have hated the expression "paradigm shift" from the first moment I saw it. For one thing, it doesn't sound the way it’s spelled. And when properly pronounced, it made me think of two coins — a pair of dimes — an image that has nothing helpful to add in terms of meaning.

Then there's the "shift" part; I didn’t know what a "paradigm" was, much less why it might be shifting gears.

Like a lot of troublesome terms, you can blame the ancient Greeks. Their word, "paradeigma," meant "to show side by side." Today, it means an example or pattern, so why not say, "We’re going to shift our thinking," or "Let’s change the way we look at this process?"

Synergy

Another of those hard-to-spell, no-clue-what-it-means buzzwords is “synergy." Is this some sort of synthetic energy? No, it’s the increase in effectiveness when two or more people or businesses work together.

Greek origin, again! "Synergos," working together. I think it would be better to be specific about what operations or processes two parties expect to make more effective, and to what degree, rather than a vague "synergy."

Cloud

Talk about a fuzzy word, what could be fuzzier than "cloud?" Yet, it is billed as the coolest of the cool in information technology.

Everything is floating in cyberspace somewhere, so you get the service without having to load the software, and storage without investing in your own backup system. I’ll admit that “cloud” is a lot cooler than "software as a service" and some of the other techie terms we used to use for what is basically outsourcing your IT needs. But otherwise, it is as meaningless as smoke.

Bandwidth

While we're floating around in the high-tech fog, let’s tackle "bandwidth."

Just what kind of "band" are we talking about? And why is the width important? At first, bandwidth had to do strictly with radio communications, denoting a portion of the radio spectrum – think of a rainbow, each “band” a different frequency of light.

Then it became an important term in computer networking, referring to the carrying capacity of your wiring, and evolving to "broadband." Today, it is used as a business buzzword for capacity or ability, as in, "We may not have the bandwidth to do this job right." I say give it back to the techies.

Serendipity

Let’s take a trip to Serendip. No, I’m not kidding, that’s where the buzzword "serendipity" came from.

The Land of Serendip is some sort of fantasy place where anything can happen. Or was it an island? Yes, Serendip (also Serendib) is the Arabic name of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) a large island off the coast of southern India. And the book, "Three Princes of Serendip" was published in 1557.

"Serendipity" is a name for those good kinds of coincidences and smooth, effortless choices that sometimes come your way. Lucky breaks? I like the way my wife put it: "You may not know what 'serendipity' means, but you know when it happens."

Clean slate

Is there such a thing as a dirty slate? Not really, because what you'd be cleaning off a slate is chalk, not dirt.

Today, we use white boards and tablet computers, but way, way back in the day a student would have a nice piece of slate to write on, enclosed in a wood frame. The story goes that when Abe Lincoln was a boy, his frontier family was too poor to buy him a proper slate, so he wrote on the back of a shovel. In that case, both dirt and chalk would need to be removed to have a "clean shovel."

Hopefully these hints will help you clear out some of the fuzz in your use of buzzwords.