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Comment by Bassilisk | Hacker News Reader

Not a native English speaker, but when exactly did "lessons" get replaced by "learnings"?

To me the latter always sounds very unsophisticated.

Ha, some time this century for sure. To me it's not 'unsophisticated' exactly, but it's definitely a certain sort of person - it's the 'Hi team - just sharing some learnings - please do reach out if you have any questions' sort of corporate speak.

Yeah I love those meetings where we have to double-click on a pain point and unpack what's going on so that we can do the work and stop treading water.

Steady on there I think we may need to breakout and take this offline.

(You know, to a Slack huddle or email thread or something.)

Not to discredit your experience, but I'm a native English speaker and I've never had the perception that it's unsophisticated. I think they can have a very slightly different connotation from one another, but in a lot of usage I think they're interchangeable.

It's corporate-speak. There are all sorts of these things.

Lessons/learnings

Requests/asks

Solutions/solves

Agreement/alignments

It definitely sounds weird if you don't spend a lot of time in that world. It's like they replace the actual noun forms with an oddly cased verb form, i.e., nominalization.

Oh, one of my most hated:

Thoughts/ideations

Jeez...

And lessons is academy/state school-speak. Can't stand the word. Take your lessons home Ms Teacher, this is a place of business.

Edit: funny how this is down voted but the corporate speak comment not :) we use the word learnings at home. It means what you have learned yourself, as opposed to getting a lesson about it.

This is why people have adopted corp speak. They're traumatized by words and need to replace them to help with their ptsd. In 10 years "learnings" will be replaced by something like "considerations" or "updates" when zoomer managers get to set the rules.

I've heard "findings" (ab)used as a synonym for this as well.

You're downvoted because this was legitimately not a noun until the last 10-15 years, and it came from corporate/bizdev lingo not regular speech.

Lessons has been used since the 13th century.

It's amazing to think that the regular accepted noun sounds snooty to you.

The least snooty would be "knowledge", which has Anglo-Saxon Germanic roots, and is much older going back to the 12th century.

They definitely had the word well before the last 10-15 years.

It might have been spelled "learninges" or "lernynges".

I’ve never seen “learnings” used in my corporate life.

Really? I'm always adding value by cascading and socialising learnings to my team. The rest of my value is thinking up innovative new nouns to verb.

The ask here is for you to align with the rest of us on learnings.

"Solves" is a thing now? We need to brainstorm a solve for the problem? Eww. Not in my company you don't.

"Aligned" is probably one of my least favorite pieces of corporate lingo to become popular. Makes me imagine a D&D alignment chart and all the black and white thinking that comes with that.

I’m a native English speaker too, and my immediate reaction when hearing another native speaker say “learnings” is to think they’re an idiot. I know they might be a non-idiot who just happens to talk that way so I try herd not to judge.

Still, the bottom line is that making nouns of verbs for words for which more commonly used nouns already exist makes a poor impression on many speakers.

I'm a native English speaker and it sounds less sophisticated to me. Something a middle management drone somewhere would say.

Apparently it's a 21st century thing https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/learnings

I'm a native English speaker and I agree, though it could be a regional/cultural thing. It sounds pretty odd to me.

Native English speaker - I refuse to use "learnings". It's a ridiculous office-speak word.

Same – just like "asks". "Here's the ask" versus "here's the request".

at least asks lets you differentiate between human requests and http requests

Soon enough we might be talking about HTTP GET asks and POST asks.

Please not this

Native English speaker.

I don’t think they got replaced. Colloquially they mean the same thing.

Maybe learnings sounds a little more casual and lessons more academic or formal.

Learnings is corporate slang. Invented in the last couple decades by marketing types.

Lessons is since the 13th century.

I’m a native English speaker and don’t use the phrase, but I’ve always thought that a lesson is something taught, but a learning is something learned. The former does not always imply the latter.

As a native English speaker, in my opinion it's incredibly pretentious.

Thanks for your feedback on the title of my article. English is not my first language, and in my native tongue, the distinction between “learnings” and “lessons” isn’t as pronounced in this type of context. I appreciate the nuanced perspective and will probably update my title . My main goal is to share the experiences we’ve gathered over the years, and I hope that the essence of our journey with Kubernetes shines through, regardless of the terminology.

As others said, I'm not sure it's quite unsophisticated but you're not too far off. It's a specific jargon that comes from people I might perhaps consider unsophisticated if I'm in a bad mood, but more likely they're just happy to be politically correct in a fairly harmless manner.

I feel like it's used because "lessons" may imply judgment to some people?

I think it happened when the Borat movie came out.

I feel like the word unambiguously describes exactly what it is, which is all I can really ask for from a word.

"Lesson" by itself might connote a more concrete transmission of knowledge (like a school lesson). Which is a meaningful distinction if the goal of the article is merely to muse about lessons they've learned rather than imply that this is a lesson from the writers to the audience. "Lesson learned" could imply the same thing, but is longer to say ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I get what the comments here are saying about it sounding corporate, but I think this is a unique situation where this word actually makes sense.

I've always assumed that "learnings" was the American English version of "lessons" in English English.

I think it's more Corporate English. I've never heard anyone say it outside of a work meeting.

Those are really American though.. like "co-worker", that isn't a word which was used in England. We'd use "colleague". It came from American English as part of the corporate lingo.

This particular case may not be a good example, but Brits tend to forget that they actually invented some of the words that they blame Americans for. Soccer is a perfect example, though I think the "Lost in the Pond" YouTube channel has a video or three with several more.

It’s both corporate English, and quite recent.

I’d say your likelihood of being misread or of giving a poor impression by using the word increases with the distance to the nearest person (other than you) holding an MBA.

I'd further categorize it as Corporate Hick English

People complain about this word pretty often on HN. I don't like it either but I've just come to accept it.

It’s a bloody American thing… Lessons FTW… uses less characters too

It's not that. I'm American and I've never heard anyone use "learnings" instead of "lessons". It has to be coming from a specific subculture, though I have no idea where.

Same here. "Learnings" sounds ESL to me.

It's very much just bro corporate speak, if I heard someone use "learnings" instead of "lessons" irl they would definitely fall into the slot for a specific type of person in my head. Very LinkedIn.

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