Comment by outsideoflife | Hacker News Reader

Comment by outsideoflife | Hacker News Reader

When I worked for a multi-national silicon valley based company we got so sick of the creeping Americanisms (to be fair their jargon was worse, they even had a company glossary for it) that we started a game.

We had a tally chart on the wall for anyone who slipped into saying one of them accidentally. I survived for weeks until I rang someone to 'touch base'!

They seemed to have a group policy (or something) that changed the the dictionary in Office back to 'American English' each reboot. I just ignored the coloured (!) underlines and typed the way I wanted as my own personal battle.

I don't actual have a problem with the variant spellings of American English. I have a problem with certain kinds of bad English that happen to seem more prevalent amongst Americans!

1) Verbalisation: "I am hoping to medal in the next Olympics". This sounds to me like they are planning to meddle with it. What is wrong with, "I am hoping to win a medal"?

2) Bi-monthly and bi-weekly. Twice a week or every two weeks? Twice a month or every two months. When you want to hold a meeting every two weeks then perhaps a fortnightly meeting would tell people when they need to be there?

3) Reaching out. To mean making contact. What is wrong with, I wrote to x, I called Y etc.

4) Bootstrapping a business: I get down-voted for this, but this seems to cover everything from, "I'm so rich I didn't need to take outside investment", to "I did this as an add on to my existing business and supported it with our existing funding" to "We started on a server I found in a skip and scaled it up from there until I could quit my job". In most of the cases I have seen it could be replaced with the phrase, "I started a business" without losing any meaning whatsoever.

I should stop annoying you all and do some work

I quite like (1), sounds amusing and wonderful -- no?

Many words in English have this origin, eg., Shakespeare did this all the time giving us the verbs "to champion", "to elbow"... from nouns.

bi-* (2) is fair, being an ambiguity.

reaching-out (3) contains less information than the alternatives provide, but do they provide too much? Given how we are connected in so many different ways now, does labouring to include which mechanism really seem efficient?

(4) Bootstrapping is an american cultural fetishization of individual spunk/moxie (etc. americans have many words for it). I suspect your objection has more to do with this cultural disposition to self-promotion and borderline delusional accounts of their own gumption and lack of others.

Europe, owing to the class system and 1000s-year+ settlement has a lot more preoccupation with the role society plays in success.

As far as all that goes however, "bootstrapping" seems a good word to mean, "I think I did most of this myself".

PS. I will say, for any offended americans, that I think europeans sometimes have the reverse delusion, esp. the british: that nothing can be done alone, and it's not worth trying.

This was such a beautifully written reply I thought it deserved a response!

1) Shakespeare did it for extremely gallant reasons though, he preserved the meter and make his text beautiful!

3) How about 'get in touch with'? This leaves the subtleties of how to make contact up to the individual preferences of the out-reacher and out-reachee. I think my concern with 'reaching-out' is it is rather overplaying what tends to be just a call to ask one question. I might reach-out to the community in an out-reach project, this might involve various methods of communication and a sustained campaign.

The usage I really don't like is 'Reach out to Joe to progress the spec', when they really mean 'ask Joe how he is getting on with the spec'.

Sure, "reaching out" does suggest an over-familiarity.

Again this is a cultural thing: Americans like to be friendly in a distance sort of way (which looks to european like pretending they are more socially promixmate than they really are).

For that reason I find it quite uncomfortable to be around a lot of them in one go. Europeans prefer social distance to be bridged quickly and directly, whereas Americans prefer to smooth it over with familiarity.

I tried really hard there not to call it dishonest. But it feels very dishonest to me. Of course, in Europe the British are the most American here: the further east you go the more direct people get.

Incidentally, this does speak to the point the author was making: how we are adopting idioms that are not culturally appropriate. For sure, I think, we do not "reach-out" because we do not include a sense of proximity in the way we speak to strangers.

PS. Our Hotels are becoming increasingly Americanized in their service culture. Thankfully it's not everywhere. American waiters/etc. are almost repulsively familiar and "helpful".

This is interesting to me. I had to deal recently with a service desk in America, and they were as unhelpful as any other. But they dressed up all of their comments with a dose of 'Thank you for calling sir, is there anything else I can help you with, have a nice day.' It was as if they felt that being sickeningly polite was a good substitute for resolving my issue.

From an American's POV anything less would probably be considered an additional rudeness.

Every culture makes a public/private distinction and has different social conventions in each.

For example, sarcastic/ironic/cutting humour is mostly a private-space thing in america -- whereas in the UK it's common to both. I'd say this is related to their deep sense that public spaces should be friendly-distant.

For this reason, amongst others, Americans have a reputation for not understanding irony/british sense of humour. It's more that they don't expect it in public places. I'd imagine an American experience of people British people joking at (say,) a funeral is something like a British experience of an American helpline. Vaguely repellent.

It's because it's mixing public/private which crosses intimacy lines. And intimacy is closely related to disgust (eg. someone you dont like kissing you).

PS. I've just had another thought about that. One of the issues we have in the UK at the moment is the importation of a strange kind of political correctness where you mustn't joke about stereotypes etc. (which is a particularly european thing: to joke about each other's culture -- this tends to feel connecting to europeans).

My guess is that because, in America, public spaces are supposed to be friendly-distant (hence why they censor all sorts of words, etc.) we have imported this sense about certain kinds of jokes.

To the American sensibilities a stereotyping joke in a public space is alienating. To a european one, it's a gesture towards intimacy.

I think we're probably going to lose this to American culture. We may have already.

Though still, it's interesting to observe: get a group of europenas of different nationalities together and they bond by joking about sterotypes. Stereotype an american and they think you're being hostile and trash-talking them.

> PS. I've just had another thought about that. One of the issues we have in the UK at the moment is the importation of a strange kind of political correctness where you mustn't joke about stereotypes etc. (which is a particularly european thing: to joke about each other's culture -- this tends to feel connecting to europeans).

This maybe due to the physical boundaries of Europe, that it's no insult to comment on another's "otherness" when they are traditionally (and a probably self-acknowledged) outsider. In the US, we're all stewing in the same pot with a more than a dash of (at least historical) racism and bigotry, so (negatively) emphasizing differences goes against our cultural mythology.

I can assure you, Americans have no difficulty with ridiculous caricatures of sterotypical British/French/German/Italian/etc behaviours.

Sure, I've considered that too.

That's the missing context British people have when opining about the American way of doing politics: that it's keeping a lid on something that here we do not have.

However I think it's more than that. The places that have the most european sense of humor and way of live are those with the highest population density. New York / Boston humour is quite close. Yet, NY -- the most dense US city -- is still only have as dense as paris.

The US is incredibly sparse. Everything is very far away from everything else even within cities: a shop is a drive from another shop.

I suspect that does something peculiar to public spaces.

The recent civil war and racism doesn't help though.

'Reach out' also annoys me. Instead I would just use 'contact'. E.g. 'contact Joe to ask about the spec.'

'Shuttered' is another one I personally detest. 'Closed' is a perfectly good word, which doesn't need replacing.

Not a Brit, but agree with you almost 100%. Although I reached out to Y is different than I called Y. It implies are more tentative, weak relationship between you and Y. I would say let me call Y if the juju between me and Y is strong, otherwise I would say let me reach out to Y

to call is rather objective, so I wouldn't say it expresses a stronger subjective kind of emotional connection, but truly, to reach out implies distance. but once you get in touch, that distance is covered, so its not strictly unpersonal. Not a native speaker, though.

I've started a quick investigation and it appears that call, yell and german Kehle (throat) go back to the same root as cold is supposed to come from, which is reconstructed variously. At least, indo european *gel has a wiktionary entry. And now my contribution is to propose a common meaning derived from wind, as in the windpipe or in harsh winter. But of course it's more complicated (it seems to me, most words go back to stone tools from the stone age). Whether that means a call were harsh and unaffective, or the word were signalling a connection to the celts (also from gel?) and whether that's good or bad is rather subjective. Likewise, reach (via rect?) might figuratively imply growth or just a metaphor for virtual meeting.

I meant proto-indo-european

My pet peeve is when Americans say “I itched myself” ... you scratched an itch.

> 3) Reaching out. To mean making contact. What is wrong with, I wrote to x, I called Y etc.

As a young nonnative whipper snapper I think reaching out kinda makes sense in the modern world. We’re connected to people in so many ways simultaneously that the way in which we reached out is irrelevant and often forgotten. I don’t always know if I called, wrote, emailed, texted, slacked, tweeted, messengered or carrier pigeoned you. I just know I reached out.

And before you say most of those are a form of writing, I think they’re often perceived as closer to talking (in person almost) than to writing.

you know, scratching damages the skin, numbs it too, but might worsen the itch, so its quite apt if introduced by double tongued nanny types.

1) To me it's similar, but with nominalization and gerund inflection. Because actually I'm under the impression it should say, "I am hoping to be medaling at the swimming contest(ing)." I have to admit, as a none native speaker i have a problem with the present progressive tense in general, yet grammarians are not 100% agreeing (argh) on the gerunds status as verb/noun/adverbial-noun status of the gerund.

Ugh, I'm American and can't stand how Americans butcher the English language. I'm now working overseas for an American company and it's even more obvious and painful.

Yes, why don't you go ahead and do that.

Ok uh. HN really didn't like this comment. Not sure why; just got downvoted instead of anyone explaining. I thought it was funny and on point. I meant:

"Great post. Another one that I hear way too often is go ahead and inserted into phrases, as in Why don't you go ahead and do X as celebrated in Office Space."

But I thought my initial sentence was sufficient. I guess not. Maybe people who actually use the phrase thought I was telling the guy to go back to work? Or..

HN members typically value substantive, constructive comments. Unsubstantial, low effort comments that don't contribute to moving the discussion forward are not uncommonly downvoted.

Ok thank you!

I guess I shouldn't have said thanks. It's a low effort comment. Last time I thanked someone for something I was downvoted.

>Attempts to add something substantive< It's very interesting, (I'm new here) the feeling of direct voting - a little like if in the real world, people could affect your (say) bank balance immediately by voting on what you'd said. It would really affect and whether how you spoke about everything. Maybe the result would be like the voting on IMDb, where the best ratings awarded not the best movies, but those that everyone understood and liked, that offended nobody etc. Well, the frustrating part about being downvoted is not understanding why. It's hard not to conspiratorialize..

But who cares about votes. They're only good for..being able to downvote others, aren't they?! But it seems natural for people to care about their points e.g. on Stack Exchange-type sites. It's the pecking order/social standing we have been evolved to be good at computing, I guess. Hard not to care too much about it.

Edit: Also, I have a strong sense of humour, I mean in almost everything I write online, which it seems I will have to leave at the door. Total humourlessness seems to be desired and rewarded here.

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