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.
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.
My comment was meant as a joke, given the context. I am familiar with these interjections, even as a non-native anglophone. Sorry for the time you took to write a good reply.
It was fun for me to dig in and find out just how long boy as an interjection has been around for (which is, by far, not an obvious thing regardless of whether one speaks English natively or not).
Same goes for trying to think of other nouns which are used as interjections (the Wikipedia article on interjections lists very few, if any, nouns).
So it was fun to think (and write) about.
FWIW, English isn't my first language either — so I hope we both learned something.
By the way, I couldn't find out why or how "boy" came to be used as an interjection — it doesn't readily appear to be a minced oath — like gosh — or a euphemism (like darn). It remains a mystery to me. So familiarity with these interjections doesn't mean there's nothing to discuss or explain :)
(I don't think I'm getting what the joke was even now, but that's beside the point)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
If it actually is stronger than a simple request, I could see saying "an ask" as a way of demanding using softer language. If your boss were to say "I demand ...", everybody is going to say they're a demanding jerk, but if they come to you with "an ask", that could carry the weight of the demand without sounding...demanding.
That said, I've never considered "an ask" to have any stronger meaning than a request. If I hear "an ask", I'm assuming I can push back the same amount I would to any other request.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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"
"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.
_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.
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.
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.
To me there are semantic distinctions. If I say there was a request, it's neutral. If i say there was an ask, you know I think it's something a bit bigger, possibly a bit unreasonable. If I say there was a question, you know it's just information being sought.
The article here points out the more annoying characteristic, which is using lots of stock phrases that don't contribute meaning over single words.
and actually A LOT less serious in my mind than a request. If you used request I would think you are really in need of my assistance and I am paying attention. I hear “ask” and I think totally not important and ignorable
> If i say there was an ask, you know I think it's something a bit bigger, possibly a bit unreasonable.
That’s the point - it isn’t any of those things. It’s made up by you (nothing personal, waving in general direction) on the spot and is not in any way a part of some imagined shared lingo. It’s all complete and utter meaningless bs that some people like to imagine to be loaded with contextual depth. It’s not.
Yeah, I'll still just say "large, possibly unreasonable request". :)
(And I've never inferred that distinction anyway -- in all the cases I've heard it, I could've replaced "ask" with "request"/"question", and it would've meant the same thing, especially with any additional context.)
Well, "win" as a noun is a word from Old English attested before 1150 [1].
And as a word firmly in the language it has its own specific uses in comparison to "victory". It would be silly or pompous to call a win in a sports game a "victory," for example. It would similarly be out of place to call a victory in a battle a win.
"Congrats *on the big win" doesn't sound out of place.
"Team A was victorious" doesn't sound out of place to me (ESL) though. Also pretty sure I've seen victory being used in a sense of "destroying the other team" - but I'm not defending its use.
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.
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.
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.
Except that "one head of lettuce" is a widely-known "measure" that most people are going to understand.
Most of this business-speak jargon is incomprehensible to people who haven't heard it before in the workplace. It seems "normal" to people like us here on HN because most of us have interacted with these sorts of business types (or are even one of them), but I would guess that most of the people who know what a head of lettuce represents would have no idea what ROI or noun-form "solve" means.
I never said the marriage satire was normal. (Although, in that fictional world, those two fictional people seem to be surprisingly satisfied with their choices of language.)
Just that "simple" is deceptive, non-universal, and sometimes contradictory.
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.
It's not clearer, it's deeper. It implies a state and creates an image in the listeners mind. You can throw it casually when explaining something and your audience now has an image in their head so you can explain the actual thing you are after.
Jargons are shortcuts to pre-agreed ideas. Just a tool.
I agree: it's absolutely an in-group joke. Maybe not joke, but a cutesy in-group way of expressing something.
Certainly someone who gets it will, well, get it. But in general it seems like a lot of effort in most cases to gauge whether or not the recipient will understand at the level you hope. Even the UDP example could be misunderstood by someone who is well-versed. Unreliable? A good low-level thing to build stuff on top of? These are both plausible meanings, but would convey very different things.
It means that you are not the intended audience because you know too much or too little about UDP.
Once I had a physicist friend freak out over my use of "exponential" to loosely explain something because he instantly began thinking about edge cases and obviously using "logarithmic" would have been more precise. We were not on the same page with the jargon, but then again I guess it requires social skills too so that you can pick where the analogy starts and ends.
My biggest pet peeve is when people use "exponential" to describe an increase defined by two points (i.e. "Americans are anticipated to consume exponentially more cookies in 2025 than they did in 2024"). Fully meaningless.
> If you just meant "unreliable", how was this better than just saying that?
It's not. Well, if the person you're talking to happens to get the intended meaning immediately, it's a cute in-joke. To me, that's the only real (dubious) benefit.
I mean, if you describe a relationship in terms of a protocol, sure, you're giving an interesting signal about the relationship, but probably not what you intended to say.
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.
In some cases yes, but the majority of the time jargon is primarily used as a shibboleth to establish group identity, camaraderie, and a sense of exclusivity.
I don't know why is this obsession over jargon. I know the cliche, it's not true at all except when you misuse it. Maybe can be used as part of a fraud or some power move or something like that but its intended use case is a shortcut to predefined ideas. It may have side effects but that doesn't mean that those side effects are the reason to exist.
I am making an empirical statement. The majority of its actual use in life is to achieve social/political ends, not to improve communication. If you want to say the majority of its use is misuse, fine. But the misuse is intentional.
I disagree entirely, jargon use is to help us from keeping defining things so we can move on to the next problem. How do you even use "unsprung weight" or "distributed cache" for social or political ends? Maybe it can be used at some cringe encounter with layperson but that's not at all what jargon is used for.
Something like "distributed cache" is valid jargon. I already conceded that it can be useful. But the majority of it (by raw numbers) is the kind of stuff of the OP is lampooning -- business and office jargon. Of course there is plenty of scientific and mathematical jargon that's legitimate shorthand.
Even there, however, the line blurs. That is, you have terms with legitimate use that were poorly chosen. Sometimes the poor choice is historical accident, but often it's motivated by a desire to sound more impressive and complicated that it is. Something like "applicative functor" might fall into this category.
I absolutely agree that some people use jargon as a gatekeeping device or an in-group detector, and that's lame.
But jargon does have value in communication where you know the person you're talking to understands it at the level you do. Jargon, when used well, can let you be simultaneously more precise and more terse.
Think about times you've sent email or even just chat messages to different professional audiences. You're probably going to use different language when talking to a manager vs. a sales person vs. an engineer. I'm not talking about level of formality; the actual language you use to describe the topic at hand will change. Some of that will be a matter of the level of detail you provide, but some of it will likely include jargon (when you're conversing with someone in the same "group" as you), and you might not even realize it.
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
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
Except that with e.g. technical jargon, the audience is important because non-technical people don’t have the training/experience to understand what’s being said.
With office jargon, I understand everything being said, but the majority of it could be stated more simply and clearly without the use of it. This type of jargon is a social signaling tool, not a useful shortcut or simplification (again, most of the time). It’s also harder to parse for non-native speakers of English.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?"
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
Jumps off the creativity shark at "will you marry me".
Should be "shall we convince the board of directors of your parent corporation to underwrite a merger deal whereby we unite your corporate assets with mine under a single shelter?
As a modern organization, you may continue to operate under the same branding, if you choose, and the value of your stock shall not be diluted.
It's funny, but it sounds more like corporate/management speak than office jargon.
Employees, when no managers are present, seldom talk to each other like this. Sometimes, the way we actually speak to each other, would get us fired if someone from management was eavesdropping.
I worked at a place where line employees talked like this to each other all the time. It was maddening. In particular, whenever the word "use" might be used, everybody at this company used the word "leverage" instead. They leveraged a piece of toilet paper to wipe their ass with. Madness! I felt like I was from space, like, am I the only one who sees how silly this is?
But again, this sort of jargon serves a social signalling function. It's metacommunication, not first-order communication. It's intended to suggest "I'm a true and honest member of the business class and should be taken seriously in business affairs."
It was a surprise when I discovered just how much negativity and frustration wells up in me when I see verbs turn into nouns when there are already perfectly serviceable nouns available.
I am motivated to passive aggressively retaliate by turning even more verbs into unnecessary nouns: seeings, helpings, deliverings, discussings, respondings.
Calvin: I like to verb words I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember When "Access" was a thing? Now it's something you do. It got verbed.
Calvin: Verbing weirds language.
Hobbes: Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.
GARY: Hey Cindy, remember last week when we were debugging that system design issue?
CINDY: Yeah, we got some pretty elegant solutions out of that sprint.
GARY: Exactly. That got me thinking: our relationship feels like a system that’s not just functional—it’s optimized.
CINDY: Oh? I’d like to hear your use case for that.
GARY: Well, I’ve run some simulations, and the output is consistent. You’re my primary key, Cindy. The stability and scalability of our relationship are off the charts.
CINDY: That’s a strong endorsement, Gary. I’ve been analyzing our feedback loops, and I feel the same way. You’ve really reduced my latency and maximized my throughput.
GARY: So I figured it’s time to push to production. In addition to all the features we’ve developed, I’d like to add one more. (He takes a knee and pulls out a ring.) Cindy, will you marry me?
CINDY: I will, Gary! This takes our architecture to the next level.
GARY: Marriage is a big commit, but I think we’ve got the bandwidth to make it work.
CINDY: Absolutely. But we need to stay agile, especially during our onboarding phase.
GARY: Agreed. I’ll make sure to stay in sync during our sprints.
CINDY: Good. Because I have one non-negotiable: we need to maintain a clean codebase.
GARY: Let’s unpack that.
CINDY: My last relationship had too many tech debts. Every time I tried to refactor, there was pushback. It was impossible to iterate.
GARY: Sounds like a monolithic mess.
CINDY: It was. But with you, it’s different. You’re modular, efficient, and your logic is rock-solid. I just want to make sure we keep things lightweight and maintainable.
GARY: I couldn’t agree more. We’ll keep our dependencies up-to-date and document everything thoroughly.
CINDY: Perfect. Let’s set up a shared repository to start planning our roadmap.
GARY: Done. I’ll draft an RFC tonight so we can align on our deliverables.
CINDY: Great. Just flag me if you hit any blockers.
GARY: Will do. And Cindy? Thank you for being my forever stack overflow.
CINDY: And thank you for being the solution to all my edge cases.
C'mon, don't just paste the content into the comments. The site doesn't have a paywall and from what I can see with a fresh browser window without ad blocker turned on there's no adverts aside from a request for subscriptions / becoming a patron.
If I had to listen to this sort of shit on a daily basis I think I'd begin to understand why you all over the water are upset about the prospect of people taking away your big shooty guns.
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.