Last year Molly Young wrote for Vulture about a very familiar topic, corporatespeak (to use what is apparently a dated term), but does so in a lively and useful fashion:
I worked at various start-ups for eight years beginning in 2010, when I was in my early 20s. Then I quit and went freelance for a while. A year later, I returned to office life, this time at a different start-up. […] One thing I did not miss about office life was the language. The language warped and mutated at a dizzying rate, so it was no surprise that a new term of art had emerged during the year I spent between jobs. The term was parallel path, and I first heard it in this sentence: “We’re waiting on specs for the San Francisco installation. Can you parallel-path two versions?”
Translated, this means: “We’re waiting on specs for the San Francisco installation. Can you make two versions?” In other words, to “parallel-path” is to do two things at once. That’s all. I thought there was something gorgeously and inadvertently candid about the phrase’s assumption that a person would ever not be doing more than one thing at a time in an office — its denial that the whole point of having an office job is to multitask ineffectively instead of single-tasking effectively. Why invent a term for what people were already forced to do? It was, in its fakery and puffery and lack of a reason to exist, the perfect corporate neologism.
The expected response to the above question would be something like “Great, I’ll go ahead and parallel-path that and route it back to you.” An equally acceptable response would be “Yes” or a simple nod. But the point of these phrases is to fill space. No matter where I’ve worked, it has always been obvious that if everyone agreed to use language in the way that it is normally used, which is to communicate, the workday would be two hours shorter.
In theory, a person could have fun with the system by introducing random terms and insisting on their validity (“We’re gonna have to banana-boat the marketing budget”). But in fact the only beauty, if you could call it that, of terms like parallel path is their arrival from nowhere and their seemingly immediate adoption by all. If workplaces are full of communal irritation and communal pride, they are less often considered to be places of communal mysticism. Yet when I started that job and began picking up on the new vocabulary, I felt like a Mayan circa 1600 BCE surrounded by other Mayans in the face of an unstoppable weather event that we didn’t understand and had no choice but to survive, yielding our lives and verbal expressions to a higher authority.
In January, a very good memoir called Uncanny Valley was published. The author, Anna Wiener, moved to San Francisco from Brooklyn around 2014 to work at a mobile-analytics start-up […]. Wiener writes especially well — with both fluency and astonishment — about the verbal habits of her peers: “People used a sort of nonlanguage, which was neither beautiful nor especially efficient: a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime metaphors, inflated with self-importance. Calls to action; front lines and trenches; blitzscaling. Companies didn’t fail, they died.” She describes a man who wheels around her office on a scooter barking into a wireless headset about growth hacking, proactive technology, parallelization, and the first-mover advantage. “It was garbage language,” Wiener writes, “but customers loved him.”
I know that man, except he didn’t ride a scooter and was actually a woman named Megan at yet another of my former jobs. What did Megan do? Mostly she set meetings, or “syncs,” as she called them. They were the worst kind of meeting — the kind where attendees circle the concept of work without wading into the substance of it. Megan’s syncs were filled with discussions of cadences and connectivity and upleveling as well as the necessity to refine and iterate moving forward. The primary unit of meaning was the abstract metaphor. I don’t think anyone knew what anyone was saying, but I also think we were all convinced that we were the only ones who didn’t know while everyone else was on the same page. (A common reference, this elusive page.)
[…]I like Anna Wiener’s term for this kind of talk: garbage language. It’s more descriptive than corporatespeak or buzzwords or jargon. Corporatespeak is dated; buzzword is autological, since it is arguably an example of what it describes; and jargon conflates stupid usages with specialist languages that are actually purposeful, like those of law or science or medicine. Wiener’s garbage language works because garbage is what we produce mindlessly in the course of our days and because it smells horrible and looks ugly and we don’t think about it except when we’re saying that it’s bad, as I am right now.
[…]Garbage language isn’t unique to start-ups; it’s endemic to business itself, and the form it takes tends to reflect the operating economic metaphors of its day. A 1911 book by Frederick Winslow Taylor called The Principles of Scientific Management borrows its language from manufacturing; men, like machines, are useful for their output and productive capacity. The conglomeration of companies in the 1950s and ’60s required organizations to address alienated employees who felt faceless amid a sea of identical gray-suited toilers, and managers were encouraged to create a climate conducive to human growth and to focus on the self-actualization needs of their employees. In the 1980s, garbage language smelled strongly of Wall Street: leverage, stakeholder, value-add. The rise of big tech brought us computing and gaming metaphors: bandwidth, hack, the concept of double-clicking on something, the concept of talking off-line, the concept of leveling up.
[…]Our attraction to certain words surely reflects an inner yearning. Computer metaphors appeal to us because they imply futurism and hyperefficiency, while the language of self-empowerment hides a deeper anxiety about our relationship to work — a sense that what we’re doing may actually be trivial, that the reward of “free” snacks for cultural fealty is not an exchange that benefits us, that none of this was worth going into student debt for, and that we could be fired instantly for complaining on Slack about it. When we adopt words that connect us to a larger project — that simultaneously fold us into an institutional organism and insist on that institution’s worthiness — it is easier to pretend that our jobs are more interesting than they seem. Empowerment language is a self-marketing asset as much as anything else: a way of selling our jobs back to ourselves.
I’m tempted to quote the whole passage about Steph Korey and her appalling memo to “customer-experience employees” (“I hope everyone in this group appreciates the thoughtfulness I’ve put into creating this career development opportunity” [i.e., being denied paid time off]), but it’s pretty long, and I’ll let you read it at the link. After a passage about maple syrup rebranded as “low-glycemic-index sports fuel,” she continues:
In 2016, Jessica Helfand, an author and a founder of the website Design Observer, was invited to teach at Yale School of Management. The idea was that Helfand could instruct grad students in the art of creative thinking, which they could then use to start companies and make money. She immediately developed a contact allergy to the way her students spoke. “It started the first week I was there. After the lecture, a student said, ‘Well, my takeaway is …,’ and I thought, ‘Takeaway’ is what you do with food in London. Maybe instead of a takeaway, you could sit with the ideas for a while and just … think.” Helfand compiled a list of commonly bandied-about words and divided them into categories like Hyphenated Mash-ups (omni-channel, level-setting, business-critical), Compound Phrases (email blast, integrated deck, pain point, deep dive) and Conceptual Hybrids (“shooting” someone an email, “looping” someone in). All of these were phrases with “aspirational authority,” she told me. “If you’re in a meeting and you’re a 20-something and you want to sound in the know, you’re going to use those words.” It drove Helfand nuts. This wasn’t a teaching position; it was a deprogramming job. She left before the contract was up.
The problem with these words isn’t only their floating capacity to enrage but their contaminating quality. Once you hear a word, it’s “in” you. It has penetrated your ears and entered your brain, from which it can’t be selectively removed. […] This hints at the futility of writing about irritating words. Usage peeves are always arbitrary and often depend as much on who is saying something as on what is being said. When Megan spoke about “business-critical asks” and “high-level integrated decks,” I heard “I am using meaningless words and forcing you to act like you understand them.” When an intern said the same thing, I heard someone heroically struggling to communicate in the local dialect. I hate certain words partly because of the people who use them; I can’t help but equate linguistic misdemeanors with crimes of the soul. […]
Language is always a matter of intention. No two people could have less in common than when they are saying the same thing, one sincerely and one with snark. And so with every exchange, you have to acknowledge a reality where words like optionality and deliverable could be just as solid as blimp and pretzel. What happens if you ask a Megan or a Steph Korey or an Adam Neumann what they mean? I imagine a box with a series of false bottoms; you just keep falling deeper and deeper into gibberish. The meaningful threat of garbage language — the reason it is not just annoying but malevolent — is that it confirms delusion as an asset in the workplace.
The only thing I miss less about corporate life than the garbage language (which I was first exposed to in the leverage, stakeholder, value-add era) is the endless, pointless meetings, but the two are of course connected. (And the whole monstrous setup ultimately rests on violence, but for that I’ll refer you to my current reading, David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.) Thanks, Trevor!
Some years ago I was temporarily in charge of running a smallish magazine for a smallish organization, and, much to my surprise, I discovered that I was pretty good at managing the editorial staff.
But then there were regular meetings with the president of the organization and her staff. They didn’t reach Silicon Valley levels of garbage language, but there was an awful lot of talk about value-adding actions and especially synergy. We once had a meeting with another organization we were thinking of collaborating with in some way. It was proclaimed that by reaching out to each other we could find many synergy-building opportunities, but in all the back-and-forth that resulted no one seemed to be able to say precisely what these opportunities might be. Nothing came of the meeting and soon it was as if it had never happened.
Ah yes, synergy — that takes me back! Mike (aka thegrowlingwolf, my former boss at one of my stints in the corporate world) used to holler “bridging the gap” to epitomize that sort of thing. It was a buzzphrase of the ’80s.
It occurs to me to wonder whether other capitalist countries have garbage language. I mean, of course they do, how could they not, but I wonder whether it’s calqued on the English garbage or developed independently.
At least they are hyphenated sometimes! Very often they’re not, and then they become as difficult to read as a long string of Chinese characters.
Neither! It consists mostly of ad-hoc imported garbage vocabulary! *mad cackling* How garbage the pronunciation is varies, though.
I was told, by a German woman who taught German to English speakers, and who had also taught English to German speakers, that in many large German companies, board meetings were conducted in English despite it being no-one’s first language. The idea was that international business works largely in English and the companies wanted to be part of that world.
If that’s still the case then I fear the German executives have had to learn corporate twaddle so they can reach out to their American colleagues and exploit synergy to devise win-win propositions that will add value for all stakeholders.
Yup, that’s a thing.
When my corporate employer’s current corporate values were conceived a few years ago, it was decided not to translate them into Norwegian (or, I believe, other “local” languages). The difficulty is not that there are no lexical translations, but that you can’t translate the socio-cultural affiliation they’re signalling.
But it’s an unfair example. My corporate existence is generally free of corporate bullshit. It may be because we’re actually making something rather than convincing eachother about it. Life may be different in the Department for Corporate Overhead.
Before I graduated from university, I went to a speak by an alumni, who warned us about corporate language and weird abbreviations, and assured us that everyone was confused about those when first starting out in the business world. Abbreviations are often company specific but words and phrases spread like wildfire. Academic literature is full of such phrases, I guess because English is the most important academic language. And Taylor is of course a classic when it comes to business studies. Almost makes me nostalgic, but it’s difficult to be nostalgic about taylorism…
In Swedish, many such words are borrowed from English. Sometimes, it’s a quite ordinary English word that gets a specialized meaning, for example “exit” (divestment of the business). Some phrases, like “track record” has the same (abstract) meaning as in English. Sometimes the borrowings get literal translations. Sport metaphors are also popular, for example “ända in i kaklet” (all the way into the tile, from swimming, meaning “fight until the last drop”). War metaphors are evergreens, so I wouldn’t consider those very specialized.
@languagehat
It’s not just capitalist countries.
In socialist self-management Yugoslavia, this reached high levels of art, with endless meetings of self-managed councils of associated labour, working groups, and other organisations.
I’ve got a delightful booklet that seeks to explain or at least summarise some of this stuff. I’m not sure it’s been translated into English – or indeed if it’s translateable.
My own experience of this guff is while working for a large federal agency here in Australia. Aside from the phrases mentioned in your intro, the corporate speech was peppered with abbreviations or TLAs (three letter acronyms). There was even a corporate list of such abbreviations on the intranet. The list disappeared after an “upgrade” to the intranet, but i saved it at one point, and kept on adding to it. There were at least a couple of new abbreviations every week.
Once upon a time, when I was a corporate drone—unusual only in that my horizons were broader than just business and sports—I sat through a six hour meeting at which no decisions were made. A rising star with impeccable haberdashery and a $75 haircut gave one of the final presentations.
He began, “The methodology that I will utilize…”. I coughed dramatically. He stopped and stared at me with corporate malevolence. I said, “Do you mean ‘the method I will use, or What I’m going to do?”. His ‘upward trajectory’ continued until he crashed and burned.
Is it time for a successor to Wyndham Lewis to compile an anthology of garbage language, sort of like the classic The Stuffed Owl?
One issue is that there are lots of terms that are neologized to provide precise terminology for dealing with specific situations, but which get bandied about much more broadly, largely by people who don’t understand the specificity of the originally intended scope. For example, incentivize is a famously ugly piece of management-speak, but it was coined to fill something of a gap in terminology.
…the only beauty, if you could call it that, of terms like parallel path is their arrival from nowhere and their seemingly immediate adoption by all.
I am inevitably reminded of the wonderful “Vectron” sketch from Mitchell & Webb:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icTrzUuWlHI
The sad thing is when you brief some “architect” on what their buzzwords actually mean and how they can be implemented and what sort of investments and specialist time budget that will need, and next meeting you see that same buzzword fluttering on the end of a very short timespan on a “project chart” with no sign of the prerequisites anywhere. Then I say “this will not happen because you did not listen” and nothing changes.
But I’m a free-lancer now, I suppose I can put in my CV that I “helped sync expectations for the agile execution of fundamentally new visions for a micro
managedservices platform.” Meaning the architects expected a lot and everybody else knew it would flop. But I’m out with my sanity intact, unlike my permanently employed colleagues. And it’s only 6 years to retirement.It’s hard to separate out purely functional uses of in-group jargon and obfuscating and/or cultural-signaling uses, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t purely functional uses. “Optionality” seems to be used to mean a range of things, but at least one of those things (in a business/finance context – there’s apparently another usage in linguistics literature where this might also be true) is a concept that doesn’t have a good shorter-than-a-phrase synonym. That doesn’t mean the word can’t be overused, of course.
As to Jessica Halland’s objection to “takeaway,” it seems like her real objection was not so much to the choice of word but to its referent. She was offended that the student was trying to boil down her whole lecture to a few key points that actually mattered and would be worth remembering (while immediately forgetting the rest), because she of course thought that every word that had dropped from her lips mattered and was of equal importance. But there’s no reason why anyone else has to agree with her about that, and no reason they’re not entitled to a vocabulary that lets them treat her lectures that way.
BTW, here’s a recent-ish academic linguistics tome that uses the word “optionality” in the title and has an unusually amusing (IMHO) subtitle: https://www.peterlang.com/document/1049774
It’s not just capitalist countries.
In socialist self-management Yugoslavia, this reached high levels of art, with endless meetings of self-managed councils of associated labour, working groups, and other organisations.
I should have known. Thanks for broadening my horizons!
My corporate existence is generally free of corporate bullshit
Let’s hope your discorporate existence, when it arrives, will be equally so.
Heinrich Böll parodied the German version of this kind of language in his 1956 short story „Es wird etwas geschehen“ (text here, for the German-capable: http://eulenspargel.de/lib/download.php?pfad=../pdf/boell-eswirdwasgeschehen-DE.pdf ). The protagonist takes a job in a factory where his primary task is to look busy while inventing elaborate variations on the factory owner’s catchphrase, „Es muss etwas geschehen!“ (“Something must happen!”)
I made an abortive attempt to translate the story into modern startup culture, and I rendered the central call-and-response as “We gotta get shit done!” “We’re gonna get shit done!”
Action Item, superhero.
Böll’s story was translated to English, by Leila Vennewitz, as Action Will Be Taken. It’s quite wonderful.
I understand that in Russian corporate culture, many buzzwords are etymologically English, but not matched in American corporate lingo. Perhaps they were borrowed from British or Indian business argot, or even invented on the spot? Some others are clearly present in the US business culture, but end up pronounced quite differently in Russia, like асап which famously rhymes with факап
Is there a point in the part not quoted where Young recognizes that “parallel-path” is not simply “multitask, like we’re always doing,” but advancing two versions of the same thing, presumably because there is disagreement on which is best, or because it’s thought two authors will each bring a fresh vision, and the versions can later be reconciled, pulling the best from each? That doing so is likely to be irritating to those involved, so it requires at least rhetorical acknowledgement that the request is unusual?
She didn’t recognize it at the moment she wrote that passage, because she says the expected answer is “I’ll parallel-path that,” which doesn’t make sense. She would need to answer “I’ll parallel-path those,” or “I’ll work on the high-concept version.”
I’ve worked on the fringe of “that space” enough to generally sympathize. But it doesn’t seem like she bothered to study the rulings of Beis Shammai. It calls into question her sense that she was surrounded by other Mayans.
Transcribing bizspeak – the dialect spoken by CEOs to Wall Street analysts – is my job. Buzzwords don’t bug me nearly as much as certain syntactic structures; the one usage that drives me furthest up the wall, whatever that means, is in terms of (or its rival as it relates to) as a substitute for literally any preposition.
Some other gems: “It’s not necessarily an extraordinarily easy task”; “We are very adept and skilled at being able to figure out ways to be able to minimize our inventory risk” (four levels of potentiality away from doing so!); “This is something that may be something that will especially work for those patients”; “by the time we get to the end of the first half of this fiscal year” (and when do you ‘anticipate’ you might get there?); “over the course of the coming twelve to twenty-four months” (because “in the next year or two” would be too, I don’t know, blunt?).
And those Wall Street analysts, whom I would have expected to talk more like prosecutors on cross-examination, say things like “And maybe can you just sort of give us a little bit of color around, you know, in terms of your anticipated burn rate in terms of kind of the next few quarters?”
@Ryan: No, she never acknowledges that parallel-path means something more specific.
@Anton Sherwood: “It’s not necessarily an extraordinarily easy task,” sounds very much like something I would say, but if I said that, it would be intended as sarcasm or humor.
I understand it is easy to abuse business jargon, but when my boss sends me a short message, like this:
Can you make an STP for the BCP, including RASCIs, by EOB Tuesday?
it’s nice because I know exactly what he wants.
So it’s not a language problem, it’s a usage problem. Garbage usage?
“takeaway” in the sense “5. (frequently in the plural) An idea from a talk, presentation, etc., that the listener or reader should remember and consider. ” is a word I learned on LH (alongside “highfalutin'”).
These all look like desperate attempts to keep talking without having to resort to um. Probably that makes these people sound “dynamic”.
In many multiuplayer video-games players play with langauge too. They quickly develop a jargon, and I remember a game where it included a personal pronoun (and, of course a recognizable style).
I do not think that the author would see a problem here. What it means: jargons are not always bad and they are natural in some way. I understand why the author is irritated, but finding the actual sourse of this irritation is not easy.
The problem is that you have both things, jargon meaning something and being useful, and being used as buzzwords for bullshitting purposes, and that it’s often not necessarily an extraordinarily easy task to distinguish when it’s one or when it’s the other. As an example, so many organisations try to be “agile” nowadays, and that also runs the whole gamut from seriously trying to implement the methods behind that concept to just having “agile” mean “we cross that bridge when we come to it” and to aimlessly change directions, and maybe to rename your departments “tribes” and “squads”.
Reminds me of the old saga:
Programmer: “This is a crock of shit and it stinks!”
Program manager a week later: “This will powerfully incentivize growth!”
(Intermediate versions left as an exercise).
I agree that most buzzwords at least start out as useful coinages for specialist purposes and that it’s as much about garbage usage as garbage lexicon. I think it’s because highly competitive environments are labovian sociolinguistic systems on steroids. Which brings me back to why my daily worklife is mostly free of it: It’s not a very competitive environment.
Hans: just having “agile” mean “we cross that bridge when we come to it” and to aimlessly change directions
A young co-worker of mine is doing a degree in technology management. A few weeks ago she sat down at the table with me and another colleague and started to discuss some of the theories. She told she’d just been to a lecture on change in organizations, and the lecturer drew up a diagram of types of change. On one axis was hierarchical vs. non-hierarchical change, on the other planned vs. unplanned. They were asked to give examples of each of the cathegories, and for non-hierarchical unplanned change she had suggested ‘death’. There were also examples on both types of non-hierarchical change, but nobody had come up with a good example for the hierarchical unplanned corner. “Regular business administration”, my colleague said.
> jargons are not always bad.
They are vital. I am a mathematician and mathematical discourse would not exist without them. But of business, law, money, politics and power I am totally ignorant. A decade or so before I retired, academics in the UK were afflicted by loads of steaming garbage language by the so-called educationalists who had the government’s ear. I remember the shocked faces when I asked for an example of a non-transferrable skill, or suggested that it was unwise to make precise the aims of education. If all that a student can learn from a course (on any topic) is to distinguish sense from nonsense, then he or she has been well served. Are there any jargons in Latin? This is not a rhetorical question.
Young does translate “Can you parallel-path two versions?” by the simple “Can you make two versions?” – though she does immediately muddy the waters by saying “to ‘parallel-path’ is to do two things at once”, which does sound more like bog standard multi-tasking, ie putting together Q3 sales and expenses projections at the same time as trying to mollify a customer in Kuwait whose textbook shipment has gone missing.
@LH – “stakeholder” – as I understand it, that is quite a useful term in that it considers not just shareholders – people interested in share price and dividends, who may live thousands of miles away – but also various other groups that have a stake in the company’s activities, such as the workers, the tax-raising government and the town the company is based in whose air and water, for example, might be being polluted. “Typical stakeholders are investors, employees, customers, suppliers, communities, governments, or trade associations” as Investopedia.com puts it.
https://www.scirp.org/(S(vtj3fa45qm1ean45%20vvffcz55))/reference/referencespapers.aspx?referenceid=2349361 refers to a book, Freeman, R. (1984) Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Perspective. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, published while I was at Prentice Hall (where, later on, I was involved in both Q3 projections and deliveries to Kuwait). I didn’t read it, but it is where I first heard of the term.
Back then I did my own spoof “budget” memo (“Corporate Plangent Sales Budget Galosh”) with implausible notes such as “1] Cum Totals Adumbrated In Down Column Under Backside Riskies” and “2] Can The Fish Stays, Or Withering Steepleton (Anag)”, which seemed funnier then than it does now… I was obviously pleased enough with it that I have kept the single sheet document, done on an old Amstrad PCW 8256 (with its unusual 3-inch compact floppy disc format) in 1987 or so, to this day.
@Brett @Ryan: i think her point is precisely that in this context (as illustrated by the expected response), “to parallel-path” does not retain any traces of the specific meaning that it had in the technical contexts that it was mined from.
i haven’t re-read it since the early 00s, but uwe pörksen’s short 1988 book Plastikwörter* (i just found a pdf of the english translation here) is a look at the broad phenomenon these kinds of corporatespeak are part of, which he calls “the disabling of the vernacular”. pörksen is very clear on the international – and specifically both BRD & DDR – reach of the phenomenon as the language of a “leise Diktatur”, and if i remember right talks about how translation, word-loans, and calquing function in it. the book feels to me (in memory, at least) like a parallel project to james scott’s Seeing Like a State. there’s a convenient appendix on the “Characteristics of Plastic Words”, which i highly recommend if you don’t have time for the full 100-odd pages!
.
* his original term & title was Lego-wörter, but his publisher wouldn’t let him use a trademarked word.
Could it be that some employers cynically introduce unnecessary jargon to test out the intelligence of their employees? Those that adopt it thereby display a lack of critical faculties.
The problem is that you have both things, jargon meaning something and being useful, and being used as buzzwords for bullshitting purposes, and that it’s often not necessarily an extraordinarily easy task to distinguish when it’s one or when it’s the other.
Exactly.
i think her point is precisely that in this context (as illustrated by the expected response), “to parallel-path” does not retain any traces of the specific meaning that it had in the technical contexts that it was mined from.
Exactly.
Those of you saying “Oh, but jargon is useful” are missing the point. Jargon in its original setting, among people who understand it and for whom it has clear and irreplaceable meaning, is indispensable (why do I always want to spell that word -ible?), but when pompous manager/bureaucrat types appropriate it to make themselves sound important, it loses that usefulness and becomes bafflegab.
No, she didn’t translate, at least not accurately, nor “muddy the waters.” Her misunderstanding can be seen quite clearly, lying atop the dead leaves at the bottom of the puddle of her mistranslation.
She doesn’t understand that “two versions” is essential to proper usage. She doesn’t show any understanding of how corporate projects follow pathways of tinkering and approval, also inherent in the word. Very likely these were not versions that some specific new employee like Young could “make.”* I’m sure there are pointless uses of the term. There are certainly pointless and counterproductive rounds of approval. This might even have been such an instance. But we can’t know that because she has proven herself an unreliable interpreter of what was said. She didn’t bother to learn the dialect she was criticizing.
If she’d translated as “draft two versions and send them around for edits, then either arbitrate the edits or just incorporate them (depending on how much trust she’s given), while I press my bosses on which approach to take,” we’d know she was a keen listener, qualified to criticize corpspeak. But it would definitely “muddy the waters,” since it would also suggest parallel-path can be useful. I think it’s an ugly coinage. But it much better describes some projects I’ve been involved in than her “make” two versions, let alone her “multitask.”
—-
* I actually expect that the dictum was addressed to a group, that no single person was asked to advance both versions, but this possibility is also lost to imprecision, the inarticulation that let “two versions” be antecedent to “that.”
She didn’t bother to learn the dialect she was criticizing.
And good for her; if she had, she’d have been well on the way to assimilation (“We are Borg”). I never bothered to learn the alleged meanings of such words and phrases when I was in the corporate world, and I’m a better man for it today.
Unnecessary jargon exists even within specialist usage. In my field it’s more common to write manus & pes than hand & foot. I suppose the idea is that hand & foot are properly restricted to humans, but if so, why translate them 1 : 1 into Latin?
Better yet: the common use of mandible for lower jaw. Becomes confusing the first time you read older literature where mandible means “jaw”, so you get lower mandible and upper mandible. And yes, I’m talking about vertebrates here, not insects.
Then there’s something I’ve only seen once: dextral & sinistral for “right” & “left” in a paper in German written by an amateur. Maybe the idea was to make explicit that these are the anatomical right & left of the animal, not necessarily the right & left sides of the picture when there is one, but that’s all obvious from context anyway. I think the author was just trying too hard to demonstrate he could write an actual scientific paper.
Vowel harmony.
Of course! Why didn’t I see it?
indispensable (why do I always want to spell that word -ible?)
Easy-peasy. The affix -able is fully productive in English, as in eatable n., whereas -ible as in edible is not; it only exists in words that were borrowed with it already attached. In Latin, of course, the difference just reflects the reduced form of the thematic vowel: -a- for first-conjugation verb roots, -i- for the rest.
As a result, when the root is a whole English word like convert, there is a tendency to write *convertable; when it is not, like *indispense, the pressure is for *indispensible. Wikt refers to the former as an alternate form and the latter as a misspelling, tending to show that the pressure towards etymologically wrong -able is the stronger one.
Now someone needs to explain French and Ibero-Romance responsable ‘responsible’ and Italian responsabile ‘id.’, from firmly second-declension respondeo, respondēre, respondī, respōnsum.
That’s more convincing that vowel harmony, even though I don’t think vowel harmony is really 100% absent in English…
French doesn’t seem to have -ible at all, if my late-evening memory is any guide; I guess the reduced suffix was replaced by the full word hābilis at some point.
Pénible, invincible, incorrigible, incompatible, incompréhensible…
I just happened on this 2013 comment by Stu Clayton that seems relevant here:
J.W. Brewer:
As to Jessica Halland’s objection to “takeaway,” it seems like her real objection was not so much to the choice of word but to its referent. She was offended that the student was trying to boil down her whole lecture to a few key points that actually mattered and would be worth remembering (while immediately forgetting the rest), because she of course thought that every word that had dropped from her lips mattered and was of equal importance. But there’s no reason why anyone else has to agree with her about that, and no reason they’re not entitled to a vocabulary that lets them treat her lectures that way.
Surely most lectures that are intended to impart information, rather than to exist as an objet d’art, have only a few key points. The bulk of the lecture consists of setting the context, deriving the key points and then explaining their value and ramifications. Then at the end it is customary to summarize the important ideas. A bit mechanical, perhaps, but if your job requires churning out several of these per week, that’s how you work.
Students are used to receiving information this way. Perhaps the student was implicitly criticizing the lack of such structure in her presentation, or at least trying to find it, by helpfully saying “here’s what I understood the most important ideas to be”. She might have replied “yes, you have it” or “but don’t forget this other point” or something else that might be helpful to the student.
Instead she provides a demonstration that the esthetics of how an idea is presented can overwhelm the idea itself. An important point, perhaps. But she’s the teacher. If she doesn’t like the way her students talk, she should help them to improve. Saying “you’re just a lot of worthless uncultured boors and I don’t want to waste my time with you” is not how you teach people.
Interesting how I failed to remember any of these French -ible words – but also interesting that they’re all learned loans, except maybe pénible.
The same holds for the longer list here (though some of the words there aren’t French in the first place, but English).
@maidhc: That’s not how I think of my lectures at all. The information I am trying to impart is mostly a set of problem-solving methods. I do not teach how to use the method of images to calculated the attraction between a free charge and a conducting plane because the students are likely to need that specific formula, but because they may need to use to method to solve (perhaps approximately) some kind of similar problem. A history professor might have the same attitude toward much of what they teach—how to look at available sources critically to extract information from them. It is a method, seen in action, that the students are supposed to absorb, not a short, canned list of factual statements.
(See here, however, for my thoughts on the omnipresent hypocrisy of historians’ discussion of legendary events. The standard framework—with emphasis on critical thinking—of how to usefully interpret accounts of events that probably did not actually happen is never, in my experience, actually adhered to.)
“The idea was that Helfand could instruct grad students in the art of creative thinking, which they could then use to start companies and make money. ”
I imagined God at a desk studying creative thinking.
Brett: It is a method, seen in action, that the students are supposed to absorb, not a short, canned list of factual statements.
I don’t think I made any mention of a canned list of factual statements.
In your example, the main idea in the lecture is the method of calculating attraction. I presume there is some preliminary discussion of how that particular approach would work and what result it is going to provide, then the derivation of the method itself, perhaps an example calculation, and possibly a discussion of some applications to similar problems. At least that’s how I imagine such material would be presented.
It’s true that as a student I did have a few professors who did nothing but disconnected mathematical proofs, lecture after lecture, leaving the entire class wondering what on earth any of it was for. But most of my professors gave clear, well-structured lectures that did a good job of helping the students to understand the material.
The answer is that those forms don’t come from respondeo but from its frequentative responso, responsare, responsavi, responsatum
@brett, maidhc
It may be that well-understood areas and areas where a clear separation of concerns can be sensibly made are more amenable to a “bullet-point summary” presentation, whereas areas where concerns can not be separated or where there is some fundamental disagreement are only amenable to a “case-study”, “worked example”, or “toolkit” approach.
>>She didn’t bother to learn the dialect she was criticizing.
>And good for her; if she had, she’d be well on the way to assimilation.
What’s truly irritating/funny/significant about terms like “to parallel-path” isn’t that they’re often used pointlessly. It’s that we’ve created a culture where they sometimes are necessary. Squeamishness about understanding this culture because you might get cooties hinders efforts to either fight or improve it.
Not all of us are called to fight the madness (and inevitably assimilate it). Some of us prefer to preserve our own sanity. Let the parallel-path culture sink or swim on its own, say I.
I two say. When the world is going to hell in a handbasket, I should become a basket-snatcher already ? Cur quis non prandeat hoc est, ask I, and do not stay for an answer.
What about “brainstorming”, “cutting edge”? From an invitation received this morning:
They don’t get around to saying how much of my expenses they will cover, so probably it’s zero. However, even if they covered first-class travel to Korea + five nights in a five-star hotel I would still not be interested.
Are you sure that’s an invitation and not a spam conference? The sudden appearance of “Chemistry” in there is particularly suspect.
Yeah, that looked like the spamference e-mails I get all the time.