At work I heard in the middle of a conversation someone saying "well, do a barrel roll in that case", like if nothing more could be done.
What would it mean in the context of business?
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5It's from a video game called Starfox. Whenever you were in trouble this useless character would tell you to do a barrel roll, which didn't help you in the slightest. It's a term people say to let you know that they're giving you useless information that won't help you at all. But I had to search on Google to find that - hardly anyone would understand it, since it's not an "established idiomatic usage" by any reasonable standard. It's certainly not something you'd expect the average articulate businessman to use.– FumbleFingersSep 8, 2016 at 12:15
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2@FumbleFingers : again, this is an answer not a comment. Why aren't you posting as an answer so that others can vote on it and the OP can accept it?– sammy gerbilSep 8, 2016 at 12:17
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1Have a look at the wikipedia entry for the usual meaning of barrel roll. This might help with figurative uses of the term.– LawrenceSep 8, 2016 at 12:17
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1@sammy gerbil: I've closevoted because I don't think there's any point in having questions like this formally answered on ELL. It's nowhere near "mainstream English", and for all I know it no longer has whatever currency it might have once had (that Yahoo answer is over 7 years old).– FumbleFingersSep 8, 2016 at 12:19
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@FumbleFingers: Very good find indeed! Digging further made me discover another forgotten sentence: Kilroy was here "meanstream" English for sure, but still in the OED.– minsSep 8, 2016 at 13:09
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1 Answer
Judging by the wikipedia article suggested by Lawrence, doing a barrel roll seems to mean that you should "do something different" and "change your perspective," setting the problem aside for while and doing something unrelated to it before coming back to it. This is common advice if you are having a mental block.
However, my interpretation does not quite agree with the origins of the phrase in a Nintendo 64 game, as found by FumbleFingers in the Urban Dictionary. There the phrase is described as being used as a panacea for all problems - perhaps the equivalent of the IT fix-all "Have you tried turning it off and back on again".
