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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

Offtopic, but learnings is such a weird word. It reads like a plural noun and if it is, then what would the singular version be?

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My take as a technical writer who has edited lots and lots of documentation from non-native speakers, non-professional writers, and so on: if you stumble over the sentence and you have to go back and read it twice or more times to understand what they are saying, then by all means the sentence should be reworded. Otherwise there are probably bigger fish to fry. In this case "learnings" would pass my test. Even if it's a non-standard word I got the gist of their idea without a second glance.

this is helpful, thank you!

I am not a native speaker, so this definitely might not even be a proper word :). Some discussion about it here: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/396140/is-there-...

No, it's not a proper word. It is, however, a word that is used somewhat frequently ;-)

In native English business circles, it's a word that someone made up so that they could say "what are our learnings" instead of "what did we learn". Why? To sound more sophisticated and pretentious - or so I suspect.

Anyway, yeah. People use it, even native speakers, even though the word should be taken out and shot.

Yeah "learnings" is just corpspeak for "lessons" because it seems more sophisticated (to some people).

This is a bit harsh and assumes mal-intent. The author said in another comment they are not a native speaker.

From the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

If you were following the guidelines yourself, you would have assumed my comment was not targeted at the author at all, which it was not. And you would most definitely not assume I was criticizing someone for their language skills...

yeah, "Fundraising lessons learned post-YC" prob would have been better, thanks.

To be clear, since someone else was confused: I wasn't being critical of you for using this word. If anything, being a non-native English speaker is the one valid excuse for using corpspeak in earnest :-)

No worries, appreciate it, but I didn't feel attacked! Also learned a new word (corpspeak) :)

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