I am sure the “impressed” thing will go away too in a while.
I am sure the “impressed” thing will go away too in a while.
My first "real" job involved writing a lot of reports. And I found out, to my initial surprise, that all the reports were copy and pasted from other reports. I remember doing my first report, and my boss pretty much lost his mind (this was my first week...he called me an f'ing c@@t) when I suggested that the report could be cut down and made more suitable for the client. Ofc, my boss was semi-literate, terrified of writing, and the threat of litigation (this was a heavily regulated business, regulators would likely read these reports) held no horror relative to the threat of having to write (he also told me later that the longer the report, the less likely clients were to read it...he managed $100m of other people's money).
Put briefly: people are afraid of having to think for themselves, it is easier to communicate in nonsense when the risk of other people finding out you don't know what you are doing is so emotionally severe. This goes all the way from the mail room to the board room.
Words I hate: overuse of super (common in tech), leverage (outside of the financial meaning), learnings (very hot a few years ago but cooled significantly), huddle, staffer, analyst (presumably they will be calling my trashman a refuse transportation analyst at some point), revert, network (it still isn't okay)...I am sure there are more.
Incidentally, one game I used to play at the above mentioned job was to sprinkle obscure but clever-sounding words in my conversations with my boss and see how many he would start using...simpler times, simple joys :)
(another misuse of a verb as a noun)
Can native English speakers tell me if the word "learnings" is an actual word that exists outside startup blogs?
"Leverage", as a verb, has had quite a run.
"oh yeah like 100% like I like that guy already rn af?"
"revert" and "reply" are entirely different words that sound kind of similar.
Rather interesting considering I don't think I had ever typed it.
It probably started because someone wanted to sound "professional". They saw this word and went "hey, this word seems like a more formal way to say 'reply', I'll just use it". Without ever bothering to check its definition in the dictionary.
It's that same impulse that suggests the 'aks' pronunciation of 'ask' is indicative of ignorance, despite it having an unbroken lineage back to Old English.
In this case, the first OED cited usage of 'revert' in the 'reply' sense is nearly half a century old and from the Times of India.
There's also a good deal of documentation of 'revert' in the 'return' sense:
1828 A. A. Opie Detraction Displayed xv. 231 None can shoot these arrows, but they must expect they will revert with a rebounded force.
Cites like this go back to the medieval period. It's completely reasonable for revert to take on the meaning of reply. In the 14th century, reply' itself was used to indicate repeating or echoing.
Doesn't make it correct. You're saying it's not possible for the Times of India to be wrong? I used to read it daily for 10 years and they had their share of mistakes.
> documentation of 'revert' in the 'return' sense
'return' is not the same as 'reply'.