Business jargon isn鈥檛 in her wheelhouse
In business jargon, wheelhouses come up a lot. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 in my wheelhouse.鈥� 鈥淏e open to expanding your wheelhouse.鈥� What is a wheelhouse, and why are businesspeople so concerned with establishing what鈥檚 in it?
Your wheelhouse is your area of expertise. To use another bit of business-speak, it鈥檚 your core competency. While everyone has a metaphorical wheelhouse, most of us don鈥檛 have experience with actual ones.聽
A wheelhouse can also be called a pilothouse, the room on largish boats that houses the steering mechanism. The term was first used in 1835, and for a century or so it was specific to boating.聽
In the 1950s, however, it migrated to baseball, coming to mean the batter鈥檚 sweet spot, where the player can hit most forcefully and with the most control. Etymologists give different explanations for this transition. A baseball player鈥檚 swing is ideally a 鈥渞oundhouse,鈥� according to Peter Tamony, which resembles a wheel. If the player can hit the ball while swinging, it would be in his wheelhouse. Alternately, the word could have moved via analogy 鈥� the wheelhouse is where the pilot controls the boat and where the player controls the ball. In any case, by the 1980s it had spread from baseball to business.聽
Like the phrase core competency, wheelhouse can rub some people the wrong way. If you want to convey that you are good at something, you might avoid 鈥渋t鈥檚 in my wheelhouse鈥� and go with 鈥淚 am an expert鈥� instead.
If you鈥檙e steering clear of wheelhouses, you can also say 鈥渢hat鈥檚 my bailiwick,鈥� or 鈥渢hat鈥檚 in my bailiwick,鈥� which means the same thing but tends not to appear in business jargon. A bailiwick (pronounced 鈥渂ay-lee-wick鈥�) is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, 鈥渁 district or place under the jurisdiction of a ... bailiff.鈥�
That is not so helpful until we define bailiff, which in this sense is not an official who is responsible for maintaining order in the modern-day courtroom. From the 13th century, bailiffs were local government officials, like sheriffs or mayors, or agents of the lord of a manor, who collected rents and taxes. A bailiwick, then, was the area in which this sort of bailiff had power.
The term was prevalent in its original sense from the 16th to 18th centuries but is rarely used today, except in the United Kingdom, where it can still refer to a sheriff鈥檚 territory, and in the Channel Islands, which are still officially bailiwicks administered by bailiffs. In the mid-19th century, it took on the sense of 鈥渁 person鈥檚 special interest, skill, or area of expertise,鈥� and that鈥檚 what it commonly means today.
Though few of us are boat pilots, and even fewer of us are administrative officials in the Channel Islands, we all have our own wheelhouses and bailiwicks.
