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I recently used the cliche "pick the low hanging fruit" in one of the sales classes I teach at the University of New Mexico.

A student asked me to clarify what I meant by that phrase. I was taken aback by her question. Doesn't everyone know that "pick the low hanging fruit" means to make the easiest sales first? Since my student's background is primarily in engineering, I would imagine that phrase probably hadn't made it into her more technical lexicon. But how about everyone else?

I couldn't help but think about a market research project I conducted when studying marketing myself back at the University of Arizona. I was curious how people defined various common terms such as a "few," "some," and "a lot," so I set out on that quest. Here are some of my results:

Majority: It always meant more than half or 50 percent.

Some: Answers varied depending on the context in which the word was used. Most respondents thought "some" meant three to five, however one respondent said she was going to the bank to get some money which, in her case, meant $200.

Several: Typically described as meaning from five to eight, although many respondents took that number out to 25.

Many: This word had the largest variance of meanings, and almost every respondent had a unique answer to contribute. For some it was three to five, others five to eight, and still others saw it as a specific number such as 10.

The most surprising responses I received were for the word "couple" since more than half of the respondents thought a "couple" also meant three. As one respondent said, "A couple is just a few, like two to three." And the word "dozen" was also a bit confusing since it also elicited the response 13 instead of 12 by many of the respondents. Maybe they thought I meant a baker's dozen?

I'm not sure if it's our unique personal histories or just the English language, but my little research project proved to me that communicating was difficult at best. Especially in business, because we also add in so many clich‚s, abbreviations, acronyms and business phrases to our everyday communications to create a sort of shorthand to speed things up.

Why? Well of course, time is money. The examples are easy to find.

Many of my colleagues use sports metaphors filling our discussions with such phrases as "go for the goal," "RBI," "knock it out of the park," "good call" or "bad call," "sidelined," or the proverbial "let's hit a home run!" Others use financial terms such as "the bottom line," "cash cow," or we're either in the "black" or in the "red." Others urge you to see the "big picture," or to "push the envelope."

Then are the more physically-inclined who want you to "touch base," "get your arms around" a problem, "get your foot in the door," "go over your head," or at a minimum "keep your nose to the grindstone." And I'm not really sure what to do with that "800-pound gorilla in the room."

I'm reminded of helping my mother-in-law, the former mayor of Silver City, move to Albuquerque. I found that she had marked several of her moving boxes as "doo dads," others were "nicknacks" and my favorite box was named just "stuff." We've had more fun since defining what one might put in each of her boxes, not to mention other labels she could have considered such as "junk," "whatnots" and "bric-a-brac."

I guess the trick in ensuring we have really communicated is to ask others to define what they mean, and give them feedback regarding what we think we thought we heard them say. Good communications seems be about making our dialog a "two-way street."

Sacco is vice president of marketing at Kirtland Federal Credit Union, and an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico Anderson Schools of Management and at Webster University.