How bad is it that I am so frustrated with one of my coworkers that I am contemplating a bingo game based on her most annoying sayings. There are some that drive me totally bonkers, things like: Drink the Kool-aid; 6 pm headcount; and cool stuff, but the one that annoys me most is "flesh it out." Of course the fact that this sometimes is stated as "flush" rather than "flesh" may be part of it, but there has to be a more appropriate choice of words.
I'm not entirely sure why this particular choice of language irritates me so much. After all, a CEO at one of my former employers used to regularly say "bottoms up" instead of "bottom up" to describe an estimation process and there is the incredibly common "irregardless," but "flesh it out" is getting up there.
If you want to make sure that everyone understands that your goal is to provide additional details around an idea, then use "elaborate" it is an elegant and sophisticated word choice. If your intent is to break the idea into its component parts, then a one word solution would be "decompose." If that is too gruesome (it does have the "flesh" aspect built in) then use more than one word -- "increase the granularity."
An occasional "flesh out the details" is OK, but every other topic? not so much.
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