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Comment by fpgamlirfanboy | Hacker News Reader

I hate all of these goofy neologisms corporate culture comes up with ("impactful") that are just abuses of syntax and have no reason to exist because there's already a word that means the same thing. In this case the word visibility already means exactly what's being described here (impactful -> impressive/effective/significant).

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This sort of thing also happened a lot in philosophy and in (the more theoretical parts of) the art world. Back in the 1990s it was somewhat excusable for non-native speakers to come up with new ilities and ities, also because they had nowhere to ask for a proper word to use. ChatGPT seems to more or less solve this.

However, what is even worse IMHO, is when people do not invent new words, and overload an existing concept with a totally different meaning.

I have to disagree with this.

Yes existing terms have meaning, but they also have baggage.

Forming a new term is a reasonably effective way to shed that baggage and attempt to start the cycle all over again.

Seeing a term you’re not as familiar with and needing to look up the definition (whether that’s a local or a global definition) is usually a good thing IME.

This is naturally happening in all languages, but there’s a big difference between widely accepted new norm and a jargon invented by a small group of people who didn’t bother to think enough.

> needing to look up the definition

Who has ever needed to look up the definition of something like "impactful" or "observability"...?

Folks who don't have English as their native language...?

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