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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

That’s some weird use of language in the tweet. It uses “demise” and “root cause” as verbs (demise can be a verb, but it doesn’t mean what the tweet author thinks it means). Is this some new form of corporate-speak that I haven’t encountered before?

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Demise is a term of art in the space industry: https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Preparing_for_the_Futur...

Root cause is commonly used as a verb https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/root_cause

There is nothing about using “demise” as a verb in your first link. I see “root cause” as a verb in the Urban Dictionary, but neither that nor your link (both crowd-sourced) are evidence that it’s a common usage. But it’s clearly not unheard of. How unspeakably vulgar.

I agree there is nothing about using it as a verb, and you seem to have a prescriptivist view of language which is tiresome.

Not so much. What I have are opinions, some of them aesthetic opinions. What is tiresome is hearing, yet again, someone’s opinions being disqualified by being lazily classified as “presciptivist”, as if that decides the matter.

Uninformed whining about the aesthetics of terms of art is obnoxious.

Probably more irrelevant than obnoxious. Is there a term of art under discussion here?

It would be interesting to root cause your opinions on the vulgarity of terms of art, in an effort to demise the inner turmoil that it apparently creates for you.

Other people are allowed to have opinions too, and mine is that I don't care about prescriptivist arguments.

Root cause as a verb is common in every engineering group I’ve ever worked in. That doesn’t strike me as odd at all, though I haven’t heard it outside of a professional engineering setting. No opinion on demise as a verb.

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