SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Most of us tailor our language to our audience. We choose different words when talking to our child than when talking to our spouse, our pastor or our boss. We may not even notice that we are doing it. It's often automatic and unintentional.
At work, knowingly or not, people choose words for specific purposes beyond just conveying an idea. They want to impress, show deference, take credit, look smart, intimidate, dominate or avoid blame. They want to cover up their own incompetence or avoid managerial scrutiny.
Unfortunately, they often employ communications strategies that backfire by distracting from the message and subtext they want to convey and instead placing focus on the language and the speaker. This can make them seem pompous or condescending, caricatures to be mocked rather than professionals to be admired.
Here are a few of the ways people undermine their own credibility.
You verb a noun or adjective by using it as a verb rather than as the original figure of speech. Instead of offering people incentives, you incent them. Instead of giving a gift, you gift them. You upskill yourself instead of learning something new. You workshop ideas, calendar meetings and architect systems.
[...] You jargon your communications by using terms of your trade when speaking to people who are unlikely to fully understand their meaning. Instead of using normal English, you use unknown words or phrases, transforming your ideas into gibberish in the minds of your audience. IT folks have a particularly bad reputation for jargoning our stakeholders to death. We tell them that we will form an agile team, use a mesh network or a NoSQL database, without any explanation.
[...] Acronyming is a lot like jargoning but uses abbreviations that your audience is unlikely to know. "Hi. I'm John from the PMO and you've been assigned as our project SME. We've already decided to use a SaaS model for our IoT product to maximize the ROI." As with jargon, acronyms appear distancing and disrespectful.
We all know what clichéing is: employing overused phases to convey common ideas. "I know we're going to be late, but every cloud has a silver lining." "We're going to avoid that technology like the plague." "I'd fit really well into your team because I'm a jack-of-all-trades, people person."
Clichés may convey the ideas you are trying to communicate, but they also create negative impressions of you. Cliché spouters appear to be inarticulate and imprecise. When someone uses a cliché to explain something to me, I assume that he is using vague generalities because he either doesn't understand or wants to avoid the specifics of the situation at hand. He seems incompetent or secretive.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday April 17 2017, @02:19PM (5 children)
It's profoundly ironic that someone who claims technical language ("jargon") is unnecessary ends up using some inaccurately:
You verb a noun or adjective by using it as a verb rather than as the original figure of speech.
"Verbing" is linguistics jargon. And by the way, it's common in English and has been done for centuries. Nevertheless, NEW or unusual instances of verbing can be problematic.
OK, let's see your examples:
Instead of offering people incentives, you incent them.
Does anyone actually say "incent"? That sounds like something George W. Bush would say instead of "incentivize"... oh wait, George W. Bush DID use that [texasmonthly.com].
Oh, and that's NOT "verbing." Verbing (as generally understood) is actually using a noun as a verb in a sentence without changing its form, e.g., we table the motion. You might add -ed or -ing to fit the grammatical place, but no other modification like adding or dropping suffixes. That process is generally called verbification [wikipedia.org].
Instead of giving a gift, you gift them.
OK, that's actually verbing. But it's also established usage: people have used "gift" as a verb since the 1500s.
You upskill yourself instead of learning something new.
Uh... "upskill" isn't even a noun, so how is this an example of verbing?
You workshop ideas, calendar meetings and architect systems.
Oh good -- one example of what you're talking about that actually fits the definition of the term you're using AND is a somewhat recent neologism. But that's pretty tame. Does anyone really object to "workshop" in this sense? Does it impede your communication or understanding?
So, the article is ironically an example of poor use of jargon. Instead of just saying that "using [a word] as a verb rather than as the original figure of speech" can be problematic (which would have easily made his point in plain English), he instead unnecessarily defines the word "to verb" and then proceeds to consistently misuse it.
The funny thing, of course, is that the article's title and examples are full of actual verbing: buffooning, jargoning, acronyming, clichéing (which I assume is a deliberate attempt at humor). Too bad the author then shows he doesn't even know what his own terms mean, which threatens to undermine HIS message by confusing his readers.
By the way, I'm all for "plain English" when it's appropriate. At other times, jargon and acronyms are necessary to refer to things by their standard technical names or to draw important technical distinctions. Yes, if you're speaking to an audience who may not be familiar with such terms, you should define them clearly first. But sometimes imprecision in language can be a real problem: if you don't take the time to explain a technical distinction because you want to avoid jargon, your audience may go away with the wrong impression. In cases of management, this could lead to bad decisions resulting from misunderstanding: "I thought you told me we just needed more of X broad (non-jargon) term?" "NO! You convinced the board we need more Z, which barely fits the definition of X; there's a BIG difference between Y and Z, and we actually need Y!"
TFA seems profoundly unfocused too. There are all sorts of ways to improve communication, but I'm having trouble finding the common thread between "jargoning and acronyming" (both potential overuse of technical language) vs. verbing and "clichéing," which generally are understood by your audience (but are part of a much larger class of potential impediments to making your spoken language seem more "polished").
Lastly, I assume this article is intended at a technical audience, since it's in Computerworld? I can understand the focus on jargon and acronyms there. But do tech people generally do a lot of inappropriate verbing or overuse cliches? Those are trends I associate a lot more with business school types.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Farmer Tim on Monday April 17 2017, @03:10PM
Came for the news, stayed for the soap opera.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 17 2017, @03:53PM
i love you; i have these arguments at work all the time but i am accused of being an obstacle.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:51AM (2 children)
By the way, I'm all for "plain English" when it's appropriate.
Slight objection: There is no such thing as "plain" English, and secondly, it is never appropriate.
It is only an accident of history that English, or as DeutscheSprackers call it "Anglish Sprache", a rather bizarre dialect of German, became a lingua franca, replacing, with all the intended irony [for those who do not get it, and Runaway1956, "Lingua franca" is Latin for "Common tongue", a language which many different peoples use to communicate with those who do not share their native language.] English has the most irregular forms of any language, no doubt caused the the irregularity of its speakers, and the fact they call their bathrooms "WC"s, how does that suggest the necessaries? And English also has the highest number of idioms of any language, particular turns of phrase that no non-native speaker is likely to ever comprehend. This makes it a very bad choice for a common language, especially on the internets. And then there is spelling! Native speakers, as evidenced every day here on SoylentNews, cannot get English spelling right! The language as absorbed all kinds of words, starting with Gaelic, and then Latin, and Greek, and then Angles and Saxon, and the Jutes (whom everyone always forgets, just saying), Germans, William the Conqueror a Norse guy that spoke French? And then we end up with old English, a bastard language with at least Five Fathers: no wonder the English speakers can have contests on spelling their own words, a thing that is not a matter of skill in most other languages!
But, tl:dr, WTF, man. PBS with the SJW who are LOL about the TMB and the TrumpB. Language evolves. It evolves toward entropy. Soon, there will be a plethora of words, and they will all mean the same thing. Differences between nouns and verbs will be diminished, just as the potentiality between particles an galaxies is dissapated, and nothing is the universe will move toward anything else, as we will be nothing but entropy, the "grey goo". English is the language for that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @02:55AM (1 child)
A "wash closet" is a much better name than a "restroom". Do you have such bad constipation that you fall asleep on the toilet? A lot of people have anxiety using public restrooms so entering and using one is certainly not restful. Wash closet, on the other-hand, implies a small place where you can wash yourself, a far better description if you ask me. Well, tons of people don't wash themselves, so I guess just go with whatever floats your turds away.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday April 19 2017, @05:02AM
"Wash Closet"? You aren't British, are you. OK, we will try to cover your crass mistake, like if you had brought a dish rack, instead of the diabolical rack, during the Spanish Inquisition, which no one expects. The proper signification of WC is "water closet", as in, a closet with water in it. I still do not understand how the Brits came up with that, other than the obvious rebuttal (everyone drink!), and your point about rooms in which one would rest is well put, and well taken. But what are we to make of お手洗い? Hand washing? But then there is also 便所, "convenient facilities". God, I love the Japanese language! So much finesse, so much lacunae? And why float them away? Save them up, compost, and put them back on the rice fields they came from, for great victory?