Eleanor Pringle in Fortune writes about Jodie Foster’s annoyance with millennials; after the standard complaints (“They’re like, ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10:30 a.m.’”), she turns to language:
However Foster was also critical of Gen Z’s attitude at work, saying: “Or, like, in emails, I’ll tell them, ‘This is all grammatically incorrect. Did you not check your spelling?’ And they’re like, ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’”
Again Foster may be picking up on a wider generational shift being observed by scholars. On Medium, linguistics professor Matthew Veras Barros wrote, “A common misconception about language is the idea that kids, these days, are ruining English or ‘dumbing it down.’” He added: “Gen Z is indeed changing English, but it is also very much a misconception that this constitutes a degradation or ruination of the language. Throughout history, it has always been the younger generations that drive language change, and then grow old enough to complain about kids in their own time.”
On top of that, Foster might also be witnessing friction with younger peers on account of the medium itself: email. Gen Z simply doesn’t email said Thierry Delaporte, CEO of IT firm Wipro, at Davos last year: “They’re 25—they don’t care. They don’t go on their emails, they go on Snapchat; they go on all these things.” Instead Delaporte uses Instagram and LinkedIn to speak to staff.
In September last year a study from Barclays also found Gen Z are almost twice as likely (49%) to utilize work instant-messaging platforms as those over 55 (27%), with 97% of respondents between ages 18 and 24 saying they want to show off their personality through office interactions.
I’m glad I’m no longer in the workplace, because I would be strongly tempted to make similar complaints, and I really don’t want to be Grandpa Simpson. At any rate, the stats are interesting, though I personally am not sure what “show off their personality through office interactions” means. (Thanks, cuchuflete!)
“show off their personality through office interactions”
This must be the result of a multiple choice questionnaire, so it can hardly be understood without seeing the question and the other alternatives — or rather the whole questionnaire and how the respondents were led to the question.
Anyway, I suspect the reply to mean that on office chat systems (Teams at my workplace) and message boards (
YammerViva Engage), the tone tends to be less formal and the participants more ready to appear as human beings, than in e-mails. For an array of psycho-, socio-, and technological reasons, this probably, on average, comes easier to younger employees.Ms. Foster is herself now a sexagenarian and perfectly qualified to yell at clouds.
The best type of agenarian.
(not one yet, but hoping to be one)
“Or, like, in emails”?? What is this “like”? It doesn’t mean anything!
No wonder there are potholes everywhere and the city isn’t fixing them. “Like”, indeed.
Yeah, I love that they left that in there.
I am a bit older than Foster, and still working in a large organization.
“show off their personality through office interactions”
HR does an annual global employee survey (through https://greatplacetowork.com) to discover weak points in the management structure. One of the questions is always something like “I can be myself at work”. Responses tend to be divided along cultural lines, and we always figured this must be some kind of American thing.
For at least the last 15 years, various chat platforms have been essential to our workflow, and this is driven by our executive ranks (who are older than me). In addition to WhatsApp and the like, they have supported development of an internal social platform.
For attitude and language usage among the kids: we tend to hire ambitious young things, and the young new employees are the ones who are most careful about making a good impression (true whether they are native speakers of English or if English is a second or third language). One of my challenges is getting the young ‘uns to calm down so that they don’t burn out after too many voluntary working weekends.
I appreciate Foster’s anecdata though, and too bad that she seems to be working under sub-optimal circumstances.
Glad that I’n not the only idiot here who did not understand that thing about personality and interactions.
Bah. “Personality” is an illusion, generated by the false presumption that real people are like the fictional characters dreamt up by inferior novelists.*
* It reminds me of the remark by a far-from-stupid relation of mine that she didn’t like Tolstoy’s novels because his characters are so inconsistent.
I also disagree with Veras Barros:)
If the point is that langauge of young people is technically and functionally no worse as a tool, I think the same. But that’s how we two feel. It is not science, because no one studied it.
Also telling people that their emails are grammatically incorrect is bad manners, unless you’re sincerely trying to help the author. But of course if you’re truly annoyed, you can show off your personality in office interactions and yell at someone. Good manners are limiting:)
@DE, an illusion maybe but is that bad?
“The purpose of satire – it has been rightly said – is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth. And our job – as I see it – is to put it back again.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanders_and_Swann
@DE, it is difficult to define “real” and “illusory” as two clearly distinct territories within human mind.
“When you want to dance, that’s real, when you think that you want to learn Hausa, that’s just an illusion, you are not really wanting it, it is just hormones make you feel as if…”…
“show off their personality through office interactions”
I think means including emojis and non-verbal decorations in messages — which generally don’t survive in email transmission. Surely lots of para-language innovation for “scholars” to get their teeth into.
Flanders and Swann
Ah, memory lane: they’d more-or-less retired before I came to appreciate them, but were kept alive in my parents frequent performances. Their songs are so well crafted.
Satire so exquisite even the target might enjoy their lampooning. (Dr. Beeching not available for comment.)
Does anyone know the purpose of MS Teams?
[well, OK, apart from the fact that it is the only way of telephoning someone since they’ve taken actual real telephones off our desks and given us “virtual” phones in MS Teams]
The chat feature in MS Teams seems like spam: It sends a notification every time someone in the office has a bright idea to share about the weather or where they are going out on the weekend and such like drivel.
“Gen Z simply doesn’t email”
This use of habitual intransitive “email” (where “do” feels alsmost like a light verb in absence of habitual intransitive “she frequently emails, usually on Fridays”) reminded me my first reaction to Robbie Williams’ “I never ever smile unless there’s something to promote. I just won’t emote.”, about Russians. I simply did not know the verb to emote, but could of course undertand it based on “emotion”.
sends a notification every time someone in the office has a bright idea to share about the weather or where they are going out on the weekend and such like drivel.
Applies just as much for LinkedIn. During the pandemic lockdowns there were none of those chance conversations round the watercooler/coffee machine. Did they ever have a “purpose”?
My employer compelled me to join LinkedIn as part of a drive to foster Customer Relations. We were to treat them as not ‘
customers‘ nor even ‘clients‘ but ‘friends’. I was not welcomed in expressing the view that ‘friends’ were the sort of people who would listen sympathetically to you sounding off about what a shit the boss was, and that the clients were worse. People I couldn’t speak freely with were ipso facto not ‘friends’.My opinions were not millennial enough.
The purpose of MS Teams is to force you to buy more powerful hardware. And solar panels for your balcony probably.
~:-| I’m old enough to remember plain-text smileys… apparently that skill is no longer taught.
The opposite, I’d have guessed – I associate the “friends” attitude with fashions among managers who are Gen X or older.
Aha, I like those solar snow piles that the “administration*” of my forest installed there.
* people who think that everything which is not trees is not “nature” either.
My opinions were not millennial enough.
I had the bad taste to work for a very large corporation that was always a quick follower of the penultimate trends. One division president, shortly before getting fired for unethical deeds with a subordinate of another gender (back then it was called “the opposite sex”), insisted that all managers mix socially on Friday afternoons. I usually took that as an opportunity to leave early and spend more time with my children.
Mister President or his HR stoolies took note and I was summoned for an ass chewing. When he finished fulminating he asked if he could count on my future attendance at the convivial get togethers with sixty of my dear “friends”. I mumbled something about agreement to join in what I called ‘enforced frivolity’.
Whatever the 1980s equivalent of not millennial enough might have been, I qualified.
The experience is apparently different… Where I work there’s very little of the MS Teams chat that Ook describes, but that may be because people (still?) have mobile phones with social media on them. Both the phone/meeting system and the chat works well for my purposes and has greatly improved communication between office locations. My main grievance with Teams is that some seem to think that it’s also a great system for organizing projects.
The corporate message board is e.g. useful for me in the capacity of union representative. The union’s closed channel is a much better way than the previous e-mail lists to create a community. The board can communicate fast with all members, keep the group updated, and get feedback on how we promote the interest of the members.
The young people at my office have an unofficial Snapchat channel with (apparently) a lot of traffic of the type Ook describes. I’ve been invited, and even had to join when we went for a two day field trip and all changes in plans were announced on Snapchat. I discovered that it was lighthearted and fun, but too much noise for me, so I turned off all notices a few days after we came back and haven’t opened Snapchat since.
I was convinced to join LinkedIn by my former boss as a way to be visible to prospect employees. I’ve not used the account for anything in more than 10 years – not until trying to make contact with Lars this summer, and recently trying to reach John Cowan.
We have at times been encouraged to use our personal social media accounts actively to promote the business of the company by reposting corporate stuff and making friends with business associates. Some people do, but most don’t. I guess the incentives are different, and e.g. sales managers work and live in a very different environment than me. And the lines aren’t always simple. I don’t seek connection with business contacts, but in Norway – and especially smalltown Norway – paths keep crossing in several places, and the client is also the step-grandma of your son’s best friend and the volunteer treasurer of the school’s marching band. I don’t repost corporate news, but people around you are interested in what you do, so I might give a glimpse if there’s something special. I’ve recently posted photos and media coverage of a project I know is of interest to both old friends from university and a lot of family.
At my work place, we also use Teams, and most people use it with discipline – no posting of your lunch or your latest mood swings to the whole company. Inside smaller channels, like for specific projects, the mood is more relaxed, but it rarely gets to the level of disrupting my work. The two drawbacks of Teams in my view are 1) that it’s hard to search for specific messages and 2) (but that’s a setting at my company, not a general problem) that messages are deleted after three months. Therefor, I use emails for everything I have to be able to find again or potentially need to keep for documentation purposes.
LinkedIn in my experience is good only for contacting people whose email address you don’t have and for keeping in touch with people you don’t have regular contact with – basically, Facebook for business people.
We sometimes use WhatsApp for organizing non-business company events or coordination of meetings and social events with business partners and clients, but we’re discouraged of discussing any serious business there.
Their songs are so well crafted.
Thanks for that, I hadn’t been familiar with “The Slow Train.”
As it happens, I am not personally acquainted with Jodi Foster, but is it at least possible that the text could be punctuated as
“They’re ‘Like, [n]ah I’m not feeling it today…'”?
That seems pretty unlikely.
She does not say that she prefers educated informal to informal.
She expressed an attitude to written cmmunication, and while this correlates with a certain attidude to education, it is not the same. You simply can’t be snobbish in all ways possible.
The sense of the quote may well be unlikely, but my experience with reporters influenced my considering the possibility that it may not have been recorded accurately.
That’s always a possibility in general, but in this specific case your suggested version seems much less likely than the quote as given, which is perfectly idiomatic.
You are quite right that the quote as reported is perfectly idiomatic.
My question could be rephrased as: who made it so?
Other than that, I got nothin’.
I give.
Reporters and editors sometimes change quotations.
Maybe not in this case.
Sure they do. But if they had changed this one, I’m pretty sure they would simply have deleted the “like.”
Does likeless “She was: ‘….’ ” work in English in the sense “and she said: ‘…’ “?
In my experience no. But there is “She was all”, which is similar to “She was like” but with a more “heightened”, generally negative, feeling.
Thanks. My exposure to English is limited: books, forums and talking to L2 speakers.
In Russian a similar form, characteristic for (especially not particularly refined) women speech*, is the adjective from “so”.
English does not really have anything similar, though it does have “such”, “like this”. French tel/telle translates it well.
“And she’s такая: ‘…’
And I’m такая ‘What?’
And she’s такая: ….”
You can of course just say “and I: … And she…”, but English “and she IS: …” is different.
* generally I hesitate to be hostile to it, because yes, it is something I won’t use unless I’m imitating a such lady, but the reason for this is that it is marked for both social and sexual group, so such hostility would be sexist:)
The apparent inability of some commenters (okay, one commenter) either to understand a fairly common usage or to look it up is really nothing to boast about.
I’m sure you’ve all heard of dictionaries. You might consider using them instead of wallowing in your own ignorance.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/like
I think you may have missed the ironic tone of the comment.
Hey, we’ve all done it: nothing to be ashamed of.
This is the thread for grumbling:)
So, in the Okh Blya thread DM linked a video with Russian soldier, and he speaks just like university students do. First they ruined Russian village and now they destroyed the cultural difference between the educated and uneducated!
Also girls wear too many clothes these days.
C Baker: the potholes should have been the clue.
While we’re at it, how can you be so sure I’ve heard of dictionaries?
Well, Y wrote: “It doesn’t mean anything!”
I’m a bit lazy to read the whole long entry, but don’t they describe when it is used rather than what it means?
This “interjectionally” does not mean anything that I can understand.:(
I think dictionaries are useless for such people as me.
About like “as”:
“By mid-century it was coming under critical fire, but not from grammarians, oddly enough…”
Isn’t directing critical fire at words the true calling of anyone who consider herself a Grammarian?
“…who were wrangling over whether it could be called a preposition or not.”
Well, while i generally agree that POS classification is not a particularly productie activity, but…. someone must study langauges and if it won’t be grammarians, then who?
I mean, seriously: do those (so-called) lexicographers think that grammarians should only criticise words?
“…the present objection to it is perhaps more heated than rational”
More round than integer.