Smooth has a number of meanings, most with positive connotations about texture or motion (smooth skin, smooth flight, smooth transition). However, when it’s used of a person or a person’s manner or speech, which is also suave’s domain, it can skew negative and suggest a pleasing, easy manner that is self-interested or manipulative (smooth talker, smooth operator), even if requiring admirable skill: He’s smooth, I have to admit! Suave, from a Latin word meaning “sweet,” suggests a smoothly agreeable and sophisticated manner or style. Its smoothness is a polished, confident, but inoffensive easiness and gentleness that pairs well with “sophisticated” and “debonair.” It can apply as much to appearance as to manner: looking suave in his white linen suit. Men, especially actors, are more likely than women to be called suave.

Sharpen and hone refer to increasing the fineness of a point or thinness of a cutting edge on a tool to increase its effectiveness. Sharpen is the everyday word we apply to knives, blades, edges, pencils, and claws. It’s also commonly extended to mean improving an ability or skill. A challenge that sharpens your skills improves them, so that you can do a better job with them. Now, something that needs sharpening could be dull, whereas hone often suggests making something sharp even sharper. A hone is a whetstone (sharpening stone) of particularly fine, closely-packed grain. The verb has a literal definition (honed my carving knife), but most often refers to refining, polishing, and perfecting skills, techniques, or abilities, as in difficult assignments that honed our critical thinking skills.

Heave ho! Discard and jettison both refer to getting rid of things that we don’t want or need. When it’s not a card game move, discard usually refers to throwing something away, as when a recipe instructs us to remove the stems and discard. Jettison is a strong synonym for discard, especially when describing getting rid of things that have value for the sake of making progress on something. Literally, jettison means to cast cargo overboard in order to lighten the load of a ship (and subsequently an air- or spacecraft): They jettisoned the lunar module to prepare for descent. By extension it also can mean to offload any type of obstacle that is impeding success, including ideas and practices. As a manager, you may have to jettison the notion that you will be able to please everyone.