A marriage proposal spoken in office jargon
247 comments
·January 15, 2025jader201
alterom
>and it’s definitely an annoy.
You didn't have to do it to drive the point home, but boy did this do the job.
ranger_danger
Or in this generation's words: it's giving annoy
alterom
Yeah. It's definitely a fail rather than a win.
insert angry react
el_pollo_diablo
> boy
And nouns as interjections.
bryanrasmussen
I think of the interjection "boy" as being some 1930s-1950s movie speak for earnest young people expressing surprise or excitement about something, not office related at all.
alterom
>And nouns as interjections.
Nouns?
"Boy" as an interjection, used for emphasis, has been used for over a century.
From Oxford English Dictionary[1]:
>boy: interjection (colloquial, originally U.S.). 1894–
>Expressing shock, surprise, excitement, appreciation, etc. Frequently used to give emphasis to the following statement.
You also say it as if it were unusual for interjection to be nouns.
Spoiler alert, that's not the case.
God is an obvious example (God is it tiring to see falsehoods online); so is surprise!, and many others.
All of that has nothing to do with office jargon.
moi2388
Whenever you are about to say “boy”, say “sport” for immediate value add
savanaly
I find that happens to me too (getting annoyed), but it's a good reminder to introspect when it happens. Clearly, there's nothing objectively wrong with actually using these words in their new meanings-- they're completely serviceable in their new usages, and clear too. There's some degree to which all people get annoyed with language changing and feel a conservative impulse to put a stop to it, but the annoyance with office jargon in particular seems to go beyond that. The source of our annoyance is thus revealed to be something else. I have a feeling it comes back to, like so many things, status games. Someone using new terminology that was just invented is (probably incidentally) asserting some kind of status one-upsmanship over you, demonstrating in passing they are more familiar with cultural norms. I wonder if my annoyance is actually stemming from insecurity that the other person is exactly right-- I am falling behind in the invisible status games. I can either accept my loss, try to adapt to it by using it myself, or remind myself of how little I really care about these status games.
pclmulqdq
Most of these words seem to be intentionally ineloquent. It's almost as though they were invented or first used by someone who is rich but illiterate. Or that the words were invented specifically to be "accessible" in some way.
Imagine getting a degree in English and then learning as an adult that an "ask" is modern jargon for a request, that a "learning" is a lesson, and an "add" is a differentiator. Business English always seems to involve a narrowing of the lexicon.
anal_reactor
I feel like modern office setting gives us unprecedented linguistic situation. On one hand, you want to use complex language to sound official and very important. On the other, most likely your room is full of non-native speakers, so they might not be familiar with particularly uncommon words. This creates a situation where you're looking for words that are, at the same time, simple and fancy.
susiecambria
It just occurred to me that I use "ask" as a noun when talking about development/fundraising in nonprofits. And it's been used that way going back to when I was in high school (1978-1982), at least. (I went to prep school so development was a thing.)
Outside of nonprofit fundraising land, however, ask is a verb. And only a verb.
Raidion
In a softly held defense of those words, they basically are an escalation level.
If someone asks you for something, it could be something with undefined scope or priority. An "ask" signals "this is official". Same thing with learnings: lesson is personal, learnings means ways things are changing.
Are there dumb business terms, absolutely, but these aren't bad IMO.
reichstein
So you're saying that "an ask" is "an order" or "a demand", rather than "a request". Why not use those words?
I don't understand what "an ask" means. I don't know what the speaker intended with it, and I wouldn't know how a receiver would understand it.
It's just communicating badly, using words with no fixed shared meaning. Or somebody too afraid to be confrontational to phrase a demand as actually demanded.
And "learnings" is just somebody too lazy to say "lessons learned".
bityard
I don't mind when language changes for a good reason. Maybe we're doing (or have) a new kind of thing and the old description of it was awkward. But changing the meaning or context of an existing word for the sake of _style_ is annoying and ought to be called out because it just adds the potential for utterly pointless confusion.
kelnos
I think what grates on me the most -- deservedly or not -- is that these particular words only end up being used this way in "business speak". I find business-type people to be profoundly annoying (shallow, surface-level/transactional relationships, etc.). For me, the fact that this is a business-speak phenomenon automatically makes it eye-roll-worthy by association.
mwigdahl
These are awful, but the worst one for me is referring to "people" or "employees" as "resources". I feel a sharp surge of irritation every time someone does that.
yoz
Absolutely agreed. For me, this goes far beyond incorrect use of language: it's directly dehumanising because the term "resource" primarily describes inanimate objects. Resources are meant to be used, but people should be employed or managed.
In searching for the origin of this usage, I found this blog post[1] which attempts to explain arguments both for and against. But, to me, the arguments it lists under the heading "Why referring to people as resources is okay" are actually stronger arguments against. They're all about making certain management tasks easier by simplifying what's being managed. Unfortunately, this goes past simplification to homogenisation.
I've lost count of the times that I've seen management treat a big set of developers as equivalent resources, free to be reallocated to projects as needed. This approach never factors in how well certain people work together or the disruption caused by splitting up a well-functioning team.
It's not just that people aren't the same as objects; it's that people aren't even the same as each other.
[1] https://www.retaininternational.com/blog/why-are-people-call...
mongol
I use to say "colleagues". That should be ok I hope.
fghorow
I used to work as a scientist in a large research org. I once had the director of HR address an email to us as "Colleagues".
Talk about cringe.
(Colleagues in my world connote someone who might be considered as a research collaborator. Definitely NOT HR bureaucrats.)
datavirtue
We have switched over to "bodies."
ryandrake
"Headcount." Even the rest of our bodies are not really required.
raxxor
I learned that they did this because some though that personell or staff would be too offensive. Same thing happened in Germany, were the English term HR is now more commonly used.
Whowever decided HR being less offensive shouldn't make judgement calls like that at all.
nicoburns
Yes, or "talent"
theandrewbailey
Or "customers" as "consumers".
anon84873628
Agreed! I've been deliberately substituting "personnel" instead.
vikingerik
It goes the other way too, nouns as verbs, and just as cringy: "you can solution this", "we need to action that".
Both ways come from subtle manipulation of language. "Ask" sounds like a polite word while "request" sounds demanding, so the former gets used even if it's the wrong word class. "Lesson" sounds harsh while a "learning" sounds positive. The word that gets used is whichever frames the speaker or conversation better, making them sound more courteous or cooperative and nudging the recipient towards complying.
DennisP
And the more unpleasant the idea, the more they pile on the jargon. Once I was at a meeting between a bunch of companies, discussing a move to some common standard, and one guy used five minutes of dense jargon just to say "what's in it for us?"
I'm not convinced though that it's just about sounding polite and positive. Normal english is quite capable of that. Using this odd jargon has a kind of distancing effect, emphasizing that you're just playing your part in the corporation, not acting as an individual human being. I wouldn't be surprised if the most morally questionable actions in corporate America were hashed out with the heaviest jargon, with the perpetrators going home feeling like they personally didn't do anything wrong.
abecedarius
> "request" sounds demanding
I wonder if this is a kind of euphemism treadmill. When the feds demand the records on a user from a service, it's an "access request", as if you could politely say no, I would prefer not to. So connotations from "demand" leak onto "request" over time?
moi2388
I’m pretty sure this is exactly what’s happening.
Also, I’ve noticed that for some reason more and more people care about the words rather than the intention.
stavros
My pet peeve is "utilize" when it means exactly the same thing as "use".
depressedpanda
Verbing weirds language.
drewcoo
Learnings.
Reminds me of Gurgi from Lloyd Alexander's Taran books (The Black Cauldron). Makes me giggle.
mwigdahl
I always make that connection too, with just that one word. Not sure why that one in particular, but it's consistent...
null
frereubu
This one grinds my gears in particular because there's a common word specifically for that - lessons.
sangnoir
How about nouns as verbs? "The new dashboard will surface potential issues. If we find any ,I will calendar a meeting for the cross-functional group to workshop the list, and task the relevant partner-teams to resolve"
bityard
"Surface" has been a verb for a long time, particularly relevant to marine biologists and submariners, although obviously it's just a metaphor in an office setting, like "bubble up" would be.
The others are on firmer ground as probably not good verbs.
ilya_m
_Workshop_ is definitely a verb, as in "workshopping a play". Its meaning in performance arts is different from office use, but they are not too far apart.
jfactorial
What's your opinion of "architect" as a verb? I was in a workshop once wherein the instructor paused everything to beratingly correct someone for 5 minutes on how you can't "architect" something because, he insisted, that word must only ever be a noun.
dingnuts
surface as a verb isn't office jargon. Submarines and whales surface.
f30e3dfed1c9
That's different: in "the whale surfaced," "surfaced" is an intransitive verb with no object. In "the dashboard surfaced potential issues," "surfaced" is a transitive verb with an object. The transitive verb is definitely business jargon.
DennisP
Or as the proposal finishes up, "we can action on our solve."
lastofthemojito
I have a long-time friend who, after years in fintech, now sometimes speaks this way unironically in non-work situations. I mean, I still think he's a good guy overall but when he recommends the DND party splits up to maximize ROI on a spell rather than just say "let's split up", it does make me cringe.
mrtksn
It's actually a useful device when you like to pull an analogy. Instead of explaining the whole idea, you throw a jargon and everyone constructs the rest in their head and understand it and know how to work with it. The whole point of jargon is to have precise definitions, so it works as a rails and compression for ideas.
rkagerer
Jargon like that in the link makes the message less precise and more meaningless, in my view.
Just simply state what you mean. Let the other person ask questions if they need clarification.
Terr_
There is no single "just simply" though. All communication is based on an (inherently fallible) estimate of the recipient's mental-state, priorities, and knowledge-base.
For example, "I would like one head of lettuce" is a kind of jargon-lite for "I would like one portion of the fully-grown plant known as lettuce which is found above-ground as a connected unit in nature." Which one leads to a "simpler" exchange will depend on your assumptions about the recipient.
mrtksn
That's good when you explain something technical to a layman, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about explaining non-technical issue to a technical person using jargon for analogy.
For example you can use P2P to explain how some gossip spread or you can say that your relationship with SO is like UDP recently.
JackFr
> The whole point of jargon is to have precise definitions
Well, not always. Per Webster:
1: the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group
2: obscure and often pretentious language marked by circumlocutions and long words
It would be great if it were only (1) but I’d often (2)
mrtksn
These are some effects of a jargon but the reason for its existence is precision. You learn it in an institution and then you are on the same page and there's no ambiguity over its meaning. Using jargon with a layperson is useless and could be stupid or pretentious.
monitorlizard
Jargon feels like 1 for the ingroup and 2 for the outgroup.
ffsm8
These 1 and 2 are pretty much always apply at the same time.
Wherever 1 or 2 applies just depends on how used you're to the usage of said jargon.
bitwize
Office jargon in particular fulfills a social signalling role rather than a clear communication role. It's intended to tell upper management: "I'm one of you guys, please look kindly upon me and maybe promote me!" But there's a dynamic similar to that of "U" English vs. "non-U English"[0], as upper management is more likely to say things like "Just get the fucking thing shipped. Our business depends on it."
[0] It turns out that in England, upper-class aspirants are likely to use posher phrases and idioms than actual upper-class people, as the latter are aware of their own and others' social status and have no need for verbal affectations to communicate it. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
PakistaniDenzel
it only works with other white collar people who have heard the same jargon, normal people in the real world just won't understand what you're saying, so it's just bad communication
mrtksn
That's right, with jargons the audience is the key.
stavros
Yeah, and then you sound like a jargoff.
pastaguy1
Jargon is everywhere but office jargon is its own sub genre.
For office jargon, it's maybe not a practical matter, but I could see a friend being a little put off by someone speaking in office jargon to them. Office jargon is sort of impersonal by design
mrtksn
IMHO office jargon is just as useful but because it's not technical its harder to adjust.
>Office jargon is sort of impersonal by design
That's one of it's functions. Instead of going over each time that the thing happening isn't personal and shouldn't be taken as such, you can utilize the jargon to keep it clean. After all, it's just a job where everyone tries to play their role to produce something. It hurts much more badly if you confuse the office work for a social interaction and things don't pan out at some point.
drewcoo
Jargon is as much about social signaling as anything else.
Consider Cockney Rhyming Slang, which is intended to be insider-only speech.
Consider the rise and then mass-adoption of Valley Girl.
ozten
At least post-mortems are filled with dead carcass.
macinjosh
everyone knows you must maximize spellholder value
lastofthemojito
The swarm takes 5 rightsizing damage.
leeter
This makes me want to have someone make a "Consultomancer" as a class just to read the spell descriptions.
robertlagrant
Hah fantastic. I need to use this somewhere.
bentcorner
> maximize spellholder value
This is such a magnificent phrase and I don't think it will ever get enough credit
teaearlgraycold
I think ROI is getting into standard vernacular. I’ve had someone use the term in the bedroom regarding certain positions.
Dilettante_
It's all fun and games until they bring out the scrum board
stevenAthompson
I'm not sure I'm Agile enough for that.
ericmcer
This happens to engineers too, it sucks. I say throughput way too often in casual conversation.
lr4444lr
I un-ironically do that too in my personal relationships after many years in start-ups.
Sorry if it's offensive!
anon84873628
I'll cop to using "use case" in real life...
guftagu
When I proposed to my wife, I met her after a couple of years and didn't know at the time if she was seeing someone. I nudged the conversation towards that topic and once I found out that she isn't, I literally proposed to her in office jargon. I said, "So if the vacancy is still available, can I apply?". She said yes, and we got married eventually but she still isn't too happy about that proposal line.
cafeinux
So, if I get it right... You didn't meet that woman for years. You meet her, subtly ask if she's alone, then propose?
That was bold of you, but even bolder from her to accept.
ricardobeat
Safe to assume this is Indian or muslim culture where it’s customary to set up a marriage between acquaintances, no dating as we know it.
guftagu
We went to university together, had a semi-romantic friendship before as well. I always liked her and I thought she liked me back too but after graduating I was focused on other stuff, wasn't actively looking for a relationship. Hence the gap.
cafeinux
Thanks for your transparence about that gap in your romantic resume. :-)
null
jdthedisciple
I was about to say I was suprised she ended up as your wife after that.
To be frank: That is among worst possible lines you could've come up with, but glad it still worked out for you XD
grumpwagon
Another classic in this genre: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/a-deep-dive-to-...
setgree
in a slightly different vein: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/i-work-from-hom...
> OPERATOR: O.K., Robert, you understand that what you just described isn’t really lunch, right?
> ROBERT: It is lunch. When there are no rules, it is lunch, Cherise!
> OPERATOR: Did you at any point dip the green peppers in the peach yogurt?
> ROBERT: Probably. Sorry.
Dilettante_
>dip the green peppers in the peach yogurt
Reminds me of that Bloodhound Gang song
yashap
This is great :) Also if anyone else is hitting New Yorker paywalls and can't read this, just disable JavaScript and reload.
ziddoap
Hadn't seen this one before, it's great.
>As 6:30 P.M. rolled around, she felt sick in the pit of her stomach, like when she looked at a sentence that didn’t contain an acronym.
alonsonic
This is incredible. The quality of the writing is on another level, it's not just about throwing corporate jargon but weaving it through a nicely written piece. Thank you for sharing, looking forward to reading more comments from you.
Regards, AA
bilalq
I'd like to think I minimize the bleedover of corporate/profession-related speech into my daily life, but "orthogonal" and "non-trivial" were just not a standard part of my vocabulary before college. Over a decade later, I find myself saying them a lot.
pempem
Ways to say: 1. "that's not what we're talking about" and 2. "this is fucking important you idiot"
are always valuable :D
quietbritishjim
That sounds more like maths jargon that has bled into office speak (to my delight, but I'm a mathematician).
cafeinux
Those are words I use a lot and I was starting to wonder if I the office jargon was bleeding too much on my personal life. Then I read your comment and realised I started using them after attending a math course at the University. I loved my teacher. Thanks for the memories.
JadeNB
> I'd like to think I minimize the bleedover of corporate/profession-related speech into my daily life, but "orthogonal" and "non-trivial" were just not a standard part of my vocabulary before college. Over a decade later, I find myself saying them a lot.
As a mathematician, both of those terms are common in my technical and, therefore, everyday speech. If it helps, feel free to think of yourself, not as using corporate speech, but as using technical mathematical terms.
bitwize
That makes me wary. As any mathematician knows, "trivial" means solvable. "Nontrivial" means no one has solved it yet, but no one knows any good reason why it shouldn't be solvable in principle. And "decidedly nontrivial" means no one has a fucking clue whether it's solvable or not; best not try, unless you're Terence Tao or somebody, then... maybe.
So if I were your boss and you came to me casually describing a problem as "nontrivial" I'd be like... "so is the time frame gonna be years or decades?"
plorkyeran
That's pretty much exactly what it means in software too? A trivial task is one that you think you know how to do. A nontrivial problem is one which sounds like it should be doable, but you don't immediately know what steps will be required, and until you look into it further it may take anywhere from days to decades.
pc86
"Trivial" in software means easy. So "non-trivial" just means not easy. As such whether or not something actually is trivial or not will vary person to person.
treetalker
The use of "orthogonal" is now common in SCOTUS oral arguments, both from the practitioners and the justices. Not infrequent in the intermediate appellate courts either. I do an imaginary eye roll whenever I hear it in those contexts.
psunavy03
Why? The entire point of a court case is to settle an argument over a specific case or controversy. So if something is orthogonal or tangential (pick your math metaphor), that means something.
xxs
That's proper corporate speak, not so much office jargon. One note: to table in the UK means to put it to vote/address, rather than "put it under the rug"
thomassmith65
I noticed 'low hanging fruit' here is used differently than I'm used to. Where I've worked it always meant 'a task that is easy to get done'
kelnos
Not just easy to get done, but has a positive impact greater than you'd expect based on how easy it is to get done.
WorldMaker
In Robert's Rules (of Parliament Procedure), which are kind of the "base level" in US corporate politics, "to table" means to "send [back] to committee" in part coming from the idea of physically collecting all the debate notes so far and setting them aside on a table for the committee to collect to take to their next meeting in order to (try to) address concerns.
In Robert's Rules to address something is to "motion" it, with "call to vote" being a common sub-type of a motion to make. (Generally addressed to "the chair" of the meeting, or asking for wider debate from "the floor", so sometimes something might be "chaired" or "floored" to imply a vote/address, but usually "motion".)
The default vote in Robert's Rules is a show of hands or a verbal "aye"/"nay"/"abstain". It takes extra work to motion for a paper or ballot vote. I'm curious if the UK jargon for "table" is as much a difference/switch in that default among UK parliamentary procedure? More paper votes would involve more tables, if that were the case, so that would maybe explain things.
erinaceousjones
Huh, I'm in the UK and certainly every time one of my workmates has said "to table" something it's meant "let's stop fucking talking about this now"
stuff4ben
I have queries and doubts on the proposed union. See attached ticket. Please do the needful.
koolba
You joke, but I know an actual couple that has a “family” Jira instance. They have tickets for household todo items like “Paint fence”.
I’m not sure about performance reporting but I think overall velocity has gone down despite their team size growing in recent years. I think the new members aren’t contributing much yet in the way of story points.
ElevenLathe
I worked with a sysadmin that did this for his kids, and even moved chore assignments around automatically based on grades (which he scraped from some school portal). Get a D and you'll have to do your sister's chores!
hokumguru
I find in this situation that new member onboarding can unfortunately take years
null
lelandbatey
My wife and I use Trello for stuff like this. Though the main use case is as the world's most reliable checklist-syncing program for grocery shopping. The task tracking is also nice
i_love_retros
Does that couple also work at the same company as product managers?
cdaringe
Digital list with checkbox is not inherently evil
reaperducer
Ticket includes one (1) proposal of conjugal union. Action this.
sporkland
Adjacent News Radio Marriage Proposal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-yGUSRdNG4
shagie
I was reminded of that when reading, went to look it up on Youtube, clicked share, came back here to see if anyone had left a comment... "search news radio" yep... glance at the query... 'v=y-y...' Yep.
I highly recommend this clip.
delegate
Start with the 'Wedding' epic in Jira. Add a few spikes to figure out the details and bring those into the current sprint.
sarchertech
Congratulations! I hate it. You did forget to include my person pet peeve—learnings.
We already have a word for that—lessons.
criddell
Mine is performant. People sometimes use it as a synonym for high performance when really it just means working about as well as you would expect it to. It doesn't imply anything especially great.
madmountaingoat
There has only been one company I've worked for where 'learnings' was used extensively. It was Swedish. Not sure if that is relevant.
kelnos
This is one of the very few that I'm a little -- a little! -- sympathetic toward. I don't know its origins, but to me, "lessons" can sound kind of harsh, like in the sense of a parent wagging their finger at a child, "I hope you've learned your lesson!" In contrast, "learnings" sounds quite a lot more friendly and less charged.
jckahn
If you don’t get the joke, you may be a product manager
ChrisMarshallNY
Here's a classic: https://professionalsuperhero.com
I think I could be alone, but one of my biggest office-speak pet peeves is using verbs as nouns.
Like “ask” (I hear this one all the time), “(value) add”, and “solve” (used in this article - I cringed).
I see this a lot on HN too, so again, many others here will obviously not agree. But I’ll intentionally use “request” or “question” over “ask” just in protest.
I know the English language has been using some verbs as nouns for millennia, but there are particular ones (like the ones above) that I mostly hear at the office (or outside the office, but spoken by “office folk”), and it’s definitely an annoy.
EDIT: Turns out I'm not alone. Thanks for the validate.