Ruben Roy isn’t a guy who tends to beat himself up, but he’s still chagrined about what he said on an earnings call last month.

A managing director at Stifel Financial , Roy dialled in to hear the chief executive of a healthcare company discuss its latest results. During the Q&A, Roy asked the speaker to elaborate on his remarks about investment opportunities.

“I wanted to double-click a bit on some of the commentary you had,” Roy said, instantly cringing.

One of the fastest-spreading corporate buzzwords in recent years, “double-click” is both polarising and pervasive. Particularly on Wall Street, the figure of speech is now being used as a shorthand for examining something more fully, akin to double-clicking to see a computer folder’s contents. Some, like Roy, find the idiom obnoxious or twee. Double-click defenders say the phrase encourages deeper thinking.

Either way, it’s become a verbal tic du jour. Executives and analysts dropped double-click 644 times in corporate conference calls and events during the first half of the year, according to VIQ Solutions, up from 139 times in the same period of 2020.

“It’s almost like a joke. People are like, oh here we go with double-click,” says Roy, who’d been trying to avoid using the term when he accidentally let it slip. Colleagues, he says, haven’t let him forget it.

Annie Mosbacher, a Los Angeles-based marketer, recalls snapping to attention last year when she heard an executive use the phrase during a strategy meeting. Afterward, she and colleagues discussed it: “It was like, oh my gosh, double-click? I guess this is a thing now?”

The new jargon makes her roll her eyes. “Can’t we just say ‘this is an area we need to focus on?’” she says. “We regurgitate this sort of lingo as though it means something, and usually it’s about trying to be impressive more than anything else.”

Not so, says Ruben Linder, who’s owned a small audio and video production business in San Antonio for 25 years. These days, with the rise of technology and a more hectic corporate life, Linder says people need reminders to stop and examine what matters—to double-click, if you will.

“The term is simple, but it’s really profound,” he says. He tries to carve out time to go to a cafe twice monthly with a notebook and engage in reflection.

“I’ll double-click on my business, double-click on my life,” he says. “I double-click on everything now.”

Double-click lingo has leapfrogged beyond corporate America. While CEOs including Walmart’s Douglas McMillon and Nvidia ’s Jensen Huang have deployed the term, so, too, have congressional representatives, influencers and authors such as parenting guru Dr. Becky Kennedy.

The phrase is “innovative,” says Beth DelGiacco, a vice president of corporate communications at biotech company Argenx , who praises its efficiency.

“It’s only a few syllables. Everyone knows what you mean when you say it,” says DelGiacco, who regularly trots it out with peers.

Tech-inflected buzzwords are especially apt to gain traction—think “network,” “bandwidth” or “take offline”—because they can sound smart or cutting-edge, says Doug Guilbeault, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business who has studied corporate jargon.

The inventor of the literal double-click, former Apple designer Bill Atkinson, isn’t convinced. Reached while boating on a recent weekday, Atkinson, now retired, says he’s never heard anyone use double-click as a metaphor and would steer clear of such usage himself, preferring more straightforward language.

He adds that since inventing the function in 1979, he’s come to regret it. He now thinks an extra “Shift” button on the mouse would have been more user-friendly.

“The double-click was a mistake,” says Atkinson, who left tech in 1995 to pursue nature photography. Personally, he double-clicks less frequently these days, given the rise of mouseless devices like tablets and smartphones.

“I double-tap, or I tap,” he says. “I long-press.”

Buzzwords tend to come and go, says HR consultant Nancy Settle-Murphy, noting that other tech-inspired jargon, such as “RTFM”—or read the f—ing manual—are less commonly used today than they once were.

“There are fewer manuals now,” says Settle-Murphy, who recently installed a video doorbell at her home and notes it didn’t come with any pictures or diagrams.

Corporate jargon can be alienating. At a conference, Settle-Murphy was thrown when an audience member asked the speaker to double-click on a point they’d made.

“I thought, ‘these are slides, there’s no link, how can they double-click?’” she says, admitting she later searched online to find the new meaning.

Double-click has a long pedigree in the sales world. Matt Sunshine, head of the Center for Sales Strategy, which trains salespeople, says when he sold ad spots for a local radio station in Dallas in the 1990s, peers commonly used the term.

“Sales leaders would say, ‘Hey, you need to make sure you double-click on that’ with your prospects,” Sunshine says, meaning delve more deeply into any issues customers might raise, as in “Tell me more.”

While he doesn’t know exactly when it first took off, he says the phrase neatly encapsulates a core principle in effective sales strategy, in which salespeople seek to identify and address customers’ needs and concerns, instead of defaulting to one-size-fits-all pitches.

Double-clicking can help identify new business prospects, says Scott Bond, vice president of consumer services at Canadian real-estate company Rennie, which recently opened a U.S. location in Seattle.

Not long ago, Bond was on a Zoom call with his boss and some new business contacts based in southern California. The group hit it off, and afterward, Bond found himself mulling possibilities.

“I looked at my boss and said, hold on, I think we’re being presented with an opportunity here,” he says. “Why don’t we dive in and learn a little more?” His boss agreed, and the company is now planning to open its second American location in the Palm Springs area.

“We double-clicked,” he says.

When it comes to France’s turbulent politics , the current impasse is probably the best investors could have hoped for.

The second round of French legislative elections delivered a widely expected hung parliament, but not its predicted makeup: Rather than coming in first, Marine Le Pen ’s far-right and anti-immigrant National Rally finished third. In a shock twist , the leftist New Popular Front alliance emerged victorious, with the party of President Emmanuel Macron and its allies in second place.

This is because leftists and centrists ended up coordinating. In many local races, candidates dropped out to avoid dividing the vote against the far right. Still, no party has an outright majority, which plunges the country into political gridlock. This was, counterintuitively, the preferred outcome for financial markets.

The CAC 40 initially tumbled when the elections were called in June, driven by fears of a potential National Rally government challenging the European Union with fiscally expansive plans. Then the French stock benchmark perked up, as the first-round results suggested that the far-right wouldn’t get a majority.

Yet markets remained volatile because the rise of the New Popular Front raised even greater concerns. The policies of this coalition, in which leftist firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a key leader, also include more public spending, on top of widespread tax increases. Indeed, the CAC 40 closed down 0.6% Monday, probably reflecting investors’ concerns about these parties potentially managing to form a new government. Mélenchon has stated that there will be no deals with the centrists.

These worries seem overblown. Yes, there are doubts about how France will handle its budget deficit, which amounted to 5.5% of gross domestic product in 2023 and has forced the EU to launch an “excessive deficit procedure” against the country. Macron may need to accept the reversal of reforms such as a higher retirement age.

Still, a fiscal crisis isn’t in the cards, because the European Central Bank is ultimately in control of France’s bond market.

As for economic growth, it is unclear how much impact Macron’s policies have had in the first place, particularly given resistance from unions and swaths of the public, which resulted in the famous “yellow vest” protests in 2018 and 2020.

What matters for sectors battered in the stock market, including banks, energy firms and infrastructure operators, is that the risk of widespread tax increases, nationalisations and a prolonged standoff with Brussels seems smaller now than a few weeks ago. Whatever Mélenchon says, the left will either have to compromise or else form a minority government that might scare investors but wouldn’t be able to pass laws.

So there isn’t much justification for the lower valuation of lenders such as Société Générale and especially BNP Paribas —one of Europe’s most interesting banks that now trades at 0.65 times tangible book value. The same is likely true for firms such as energy utility Engie and infrastructure-concessions leader Vinci , which have lost 8% of their market value since the end of May.

These elections are more a symptom of Macron’s weakness than its cause. After a chaotic month, French politics is back where it has been for years, with a rising far right forcing the left to back a centrist platform that can achieve little because few people actually like it. Macron himself became president on an anti-Le Pen ticket, but in seven years has failed to rally broad support for his pro-business vision.

This could eventually make Le Pen’s victory inevitable, as she claimed after initial results came in. For now, though, it is more or less what markets ordered.

Christian Dior struck gold when it found a supplier willing to assemble a €2,600 handbag, equivalent to around $2,816, for just €53 a piece—or did it? Cleaning up the reputational damage may not come cheap.

A Milan court named LVMH -owned Dior and Giorgio Armani as two brands whose products were made in sweatshop-like conditions in Italy. Images of an unkempt facility where designer handbags were produced, which was raided as part of an investigation into Italy’s fashion supply chain, are worlds apart from those the luxury industry likes to show its customers.

To keep up with the strong demand for their goods, some high-end brands rely on independent workshops to supplement their in-house factories. Sales at LVMH’s leather goods division have almost doubled since 2019.

While more outsourced manufacturing is understandable in a boom, brands may also have taken cost-saving measures too far in a push to juice profits. Some of Dior’s production was contracted out directly to a Chinese-run factory in Italy, where workers assembled the bags in unsafe conditions, according to a translated court order. In other instances, Dior’s suppliers subcontracted work out to low-cost factories that also used irregular labour.

Nipping the problem in the bud would require hundreds of millions of dollars worth of investment in new facilities to bring more manufacturing in-house. The alternative is for Dior to pay its suppliers more and keep them on a tighter leash. Either way, the result seems likely to be lower profits than shareholders have grown accustomed to.

Top luxury brands such as Christian Dior can have very high margins because consumers are willing to pay steep prices for goods they see as status symbols. They also can spread high fixed costs, such as expensive advertising campaigns over a large volume of sales.

For the LVMH group overall, the cost of making the products it sells—everything from Champagne to watches to cosmetics—amounted to 31% of sales in 2023. But the margins on big-brand handbags are probably at the high end of the spectrum.

Bernstein analyst Luca Solca estimates that a €10 billion luxury fashion label, roughly Dior’s size, may spend just 23% of its sales on the raw materials and labour that go into its products. This implies a €2,600 Dior purse would cost €598 to make, equivalent to $US647 for a roughly $US2,800 product at current exchange rates.

In reality, the cost may be even lower, based on the results of the Italian investigation. The €53-a-piece assembly price it cited, equivalent to around $US57, didn’t include the cost of the leather and hardware, but that would add only another €150 or so, according to one Italian supplier.

Advertising fees are a further €156 per handbag, according to Bernstein’s analysis, and depreciation of the company’s assets is €156. Running the brand’s stores—including paying the rent on some of the most exclusive shopping streets in the world—and head-office costs come to an additional €390. This leaves €1,300 of pure operating profit for Dior, or a 50% margin.

“This is the reality of the business,” says Solca. “The retail price for the goods of major luxury brands is typically between eight and 12 times the cost of making the product.”

LVMH hasn’t commented on the investigation, which first made headlines nearly a month ago. Meanwhile, a public-relations storm is brewing. Luxury influencers on social media are asking what exactly people are paying for when they shell out for a fancy purse. Recent price increases also make the cheap manufacturing costs hard to stomach. A mini Lady Dior bag that cost $3,500 in 2019 will set shoppers back $5,500 today, a 57% increase.

A dozen other luxury labels that remain unnamed are under investigation for similar issues in their Italian supply chains, so this may be a much wider problem.

Profits will take a hit if the industry decides to clean up its act. But the cost of doing nothing might be higher. Luxury brands that charge customers thousands of dollars and rely on a reputation for quality can’t afford to be cheap.