Item — HN Reader

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.

14 comments

>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.

Or in this generation's words: it's giving annoy

Yeah. It's definitely a fail rather than a win.

insert angry react

> boy

And nouns as interjections.

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.

>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.

[1] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/boy_n1#15546734

Whenever you are about to say “boy”, say “sport” for immediate value add

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".

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.

[1] https://www.retaininternational.com/blog/why-are-people-call...

I use to say "colleagues". That should be ok I hope.

We have switched over to "bodies."

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.

Yes, or "talent"

Or "customers" as "consumers".

Agreed! I've been deliberately substituting "personnel" instead.

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.

> "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?

My pet peeve is "utilize" when it means exactly the same thing as "use".

Verbing weirds language.

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25

Learnings.

Reminds me of Gurgi from Lloyd Alexander's Taran books (The Black Cauldron). Makes me giggle.

I always make that connection too, with just that one word. Not sure why that one in particular, but it's consistent...

This one grinds my gears in particular because there's a common word specifically for that - lessons.

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.

surface as a verb isn't office jargon. Submarines and whales surface.

Or as the proposal finishes up, "we can action on our solve."

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.

> “There was an ask.”

This communicates nothing to me other than that the speaker probably is going to continue to annoy me.

> 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.

Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?

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.)

Almost literally every noun in English can be verbed, and verbs can often be nouned.

Totally agree. Before I clicked into these comments I was actually just thinking about the single example that irks me the most is "the understand".

Oh wow, that's a new one. Have you really heard that in conversation?

I'm so sorry.

Not an english native, but I have the same with "win" -> "victory".

Like, "congrats for the win" or "big win".

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.

[1] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/win_n1?tab=factsheet#14538168

You deserve an invite to our discord server.

This point come up in every thread about office speak, so rest easy that you are not alone