A shortfall is something that happens to a bucket. The rain didn’t fill it. “Revenue shortfall” makes money a weather system and the company a bucket that was, through no fault of its own, left out on a dry week.

The phrase belongs to a large family of accounting chickens: “headwinds” for things went badly, “softness” for nobody’s buying, “a challenging quarter” for we lost money, “negative growth” for the same, and the all-time champion, “we are not where we want to be,” which is true of everyone and says nothing.

Mamet’s test for this sort of language was simple: would a person say it to a friend? Nobody tells a friend they experienced a revenue shortfall. They say “we lost money,” and then they say why. The euphemism exists specifically to stop the conversation before the “why.”