A company facing headwinds is a ship: sturdy, well-captained, and struggling only because the weather turned. The word places the cause of poor results outside the building. It was the wind. Management leaned into it bravely. Nothing could have been done.

The tell is the opposite term. When results are good, they are rarely credited to “tailwinds.” Good quarters are the result of strategy and execution; bad quarters are the result of headwinds. The vocabulary is asymmetric by design.

“Revenue shortfall,” elsewhere in this dictionary, makes money a bucket left out in a dry spell. “Headwinds” makes the company a vessel at the mercy of the sky. Both remove the people who made the decisions. Mamet’s advice was to ask whether a person would say this to a friend. “We had headwinds” is not a sentence anyone has used at a kitchen table.