Hacker News Reader

Comment by eadmund | Hacker News Reader

> “Yes,” the strategist answered. “That’s an operational solve.”

I recall several years ago 'ask' being used as a noun (which struck me as very odd, given that 'request' exists and suffices); the use of 'solve' instead of 'solution' seems equally gratuitous.

Has anyone spotted any other similar oddities in the wild? I wonder if it's a trend. One wonders if 'food' will someday just be called 'eat' (yes, there's already 'eats,' which is subtly different) or 'article' 'read.'

Reading the article itself, it's a little amusing how much of this is trend-chasing (European blazers, odd habits of speech, 'lighter, brighter, fresher') rather than trend-setting. It's a bit like a middle-aged dad trying to seem 'hip' and 'with-it.'

Incidentally, the restaurant in question appears to be Pei Wei.

View on HN

>Has anyone spotted any other similar oddities in the wild? I wonder if it's a trend.

The noun-ifying of verbs and verb-ifying of nouns has been a trend in language evolution for hundreds (and possibly thousands) of years. For example, the etymology for "drink" is a verb of "to drink"[1]. A few hundred years later, it was noun-ified. (We can now say "I need a drink" -- without the language police snickering.) We just don't notice it and/or it doesn't bother us because it acquired its extra "noun" meaning before we were born.

By some quirk of human nature, we are extremely annoyed if words acquire these new extra meanings after we are born. This means the cycle repeats itself... the people living in 2018 are irritated by it but the people living in year 2130 won't care. (To the world: Please stop changing the language and keep all meanings+spellings+pronunciations static while I'm still alive!)

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/drink

One that always stuck out to me is "burgle", coming from "burglar", likely by mistake.

Better than the atrocity of “burglarize”!

The line from the old Hobbit movie of "you're the burglar, go in there and burgle something" was quaint enough that I still remember it from my childhood.

The minor fascination with noun-er & noun was probably why.

Americans never use the word "burgle". The first time I heard British people saying it, I wanted to cut my ears off.

Plaintiff comes from plaintive

'ask' is a noun in finance because 'bid-ask' is one of the most commonly used noun pairs to represent both sides of the market. As for why it's not 'bid-request', probably because request has an extra syllable—one too many for trading pit jargon.

I'd wager that a lot of unusual vocabulary uses come from jargon where the requirements are different. There's plenty of that in software engineering too:

1. You 'ls' a directory, not 'list' it

2. 'Ack' packets instead of 'acknowledgement'

3. 'Build' as a noun instead of a more idiomatic gerund like 'building', presumably since it would get confused with the more common 'building' as a structure.

4. 'malloc' instead of 'memory allocation', 'googling' instead of 'searching', 'ripping' (an MP3) instead of 'transcoding'

We just don't notice it because the jargon has become invisible through repeated use.

It seems like 'ask' in the financial sense is subtly different from 'request', also.

A request is commonly something you make to someone, which doesn't apply to the case of offering a sale to an open market. An ask is the thing for which you set your 'asking price', so it's almost closer to a challenge than a request - "I'll reward whoever hits price X with a share of stock".

And that subtly different meaning seems to carry over to 'ask' as a common noun. You wouldn't say "the Lunar X Prize was a huge request" because it wasn't requested of any specific group, but you might say "the Lunar X Prize was a huge ask", meaning "whoever tried to meet this bar had a very hard task".

> or 'article' 'read'

... well, "this article is a good read" is already a timeworn collocation – according to Google, "good read" first peaked around 1920.

It's interesting. The brutalization of "ask" and "solve" into nouns is a shibboleth of the it's all just business to me crowd, just like the buzzwords on their "driven professional" LinkedIn pages. It's obnoxious.

But put that aside, and it becomes a creative exercise: what if the English language had no nouns, and we thought of the objects around us purely in terms of their functional affordances?

"Learnings", which seems to be uttered by people who also speak of "asks". I find all these terrible.

At a previous company, I got a rousing, multi-meeting game of “punch learnings” going. Eventually, management issued a memo that the term “learnings” should not be used in larger meetings as it was too disruptive. I felt like I had done good work.

Please do the needful.

kindly revert back with the same

Your attitude is double plus un-good.

What about "code"? In the scientific community it's used to refer to a piece of software. As in, "vector computers are good at running CFD [computational fluid-dynamics] codes" or even "I am trying to write a code to calculate foo".

I love how math and science people say that.

"The codes aren't working"

"I need to fix the codes"

"Does anybody have a good code for ..."

"I'm Gilbert Strang, a real code wouldn't do it this way, but it's instructive."

I'm guessing it's gotta be something related to Fortran. Some seminal book or maybe some reference to the "coding sheets" that people would fill out to have keyed in. If your program is long, then you have multiple sheets, so maybe that's where the plural comes from?

About the verbs used as nouns, I work with a team based in China, and they do that all the time (and sometimes they used nouns as verbs). I know nothing of Mandarin but maybe it's a thing common in this language that they do uncounsciously when they speak English.

English is my second language, but ever since becoming somewhat proficient in it, I thought verbing and nouning are features of English (contrast with e.g. Polish, where while a possible and formally recognized transformation, it's still very much frowned upon).

This kind of thing drives me crazy. I've never understood the motivation behind it. The same goes for the use of the word "utilize", which in my experience, serves no purpose other than to make the author sound like a poser.

The motivation behind it is that this is where new words come from. Two words which start out with similar meaning can acquire nuance over time, which increases the subtlety and capability of the language. I don’t understand why people (often people who claim to love language and words) can be annoyed by the coinage of more words.

On one level, sure, utilize, use, and even employ are synonyms - but there is a shade to ‘utilize’ that suggests more ‘extract utility from’. It’s there more strongly when used comparatively - there’s a difference between

“How can we use Dave more?” And “How can we utilize Dave more?”

But of course the distinction is completely absent in

“This solution uses Golang and Mongo” Vs “This solution utilizes Golang and Mongo”

And likewise there is a nuance of difference between an ‘ask’ and a ‘request’, or a ‘solution’ and a ‘solve’. Maybe you can’t hear it yet because these words are new and people are experimenting to find the nuance, but it will likely emerge.

As for another example in the wild, many people have settled on "invite" instead of "invitation."

I believe it to be Pei Wei as well. Their menu is dated, their food preparation & presentation is haphazard, and I always feel like I'm being hustled through my meal. It's like I'm eating at a Disney theme park.

I think they'd do better if they were to have 20% of their menu devoted to locally sourced, seasonal items. And leave the 80% for the perennial favorites (with occasional pruning).

https://www.peiwei.com/orangechicken yep

At the agency level things like this happen all the time. It’s an abstraction from the problem that suggests it isn’t one.

Makes me miss LA.

> Makes me miss LA.

where people are simple, straightforward, and down to earth?

hmm.

As a counterpoint, “solve” used as a noun is very common in the cubing community though, and I don't think it's supposed to sound trendy or anything. It also sounds quite normal coming from numerical analysis domain I think.

However it does seem strange if meaning “solution” generically.

I listened to a webinar for some software, and the presenter boasted that a feature has been “up-leveled” in the new version. I thought it was embarrassing tbh. As though is not enough to “improve” things any more.

With the ask/solve thing, this is pretty much my favourite part of the English language - any noun can be used as verb, and any verb can be used as noun, while still being understood.

Germane to this article -- the pretention of calling a restaurant an "eatery."

Books are referred to as “reads” - “check out this great read!”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com