Business Words to Ban | Hacker News Reader

Business Words to Ban

blogs.harvardbusiness.org

10 pointssarahk113011 comments

9. And/or An editor once told me, "And-slash-or means 'and' or 'or,' so pick one, unless you have no idea what you're trying to say, in which case, by all means use it."

I think that to some people this could seem misleading and/or incorrect.

8. People manager As opposed to "Goldfish supervisor?" Seriously, this is a "try not to offend anyone term," that makes managers of people and non-people (whatever that is) feel less like managers or people and more like guppies.

"Manager" is a very wide term. You can manage processes, you can manage inventories, you can manage people, you can manage documents. Is a document manager a people manager? No.

5. Take Away You take away food in a paper bag with a clown on it. Period.

Sometimes "What's the take-away from this?" can be a good quick synonym for "What are the important conclusions and insights we should get from this?" You might dislike it, but it's hardly ban-worthy.

Certainly, some of the examples there are pretty annoying, but I don't get the whole "words to ban" thing... seems like a pretty weak article for a publication by a prestigious university.

Well in normal English, 'or' is generally exclusive. The cat is black or red. (Generally understood that he is one or the other, not both.)

So, to me, 'and/or' is the English equivalent of the inclusive OR. The cat is black and/or red. (The cat may be black or red or both.)

Pretty sure this was discussed here a while back. (English boolean operators versus the programming kind.)

  English     Logic
  and         AND
  or          XOR
  and/or      OR

So yeah, I'd agree with you in that I think the author's banning of 'and/or' is wrong. Honestly the only ones that I agreed with were 6, 7, 8, and 10. I've never even heard people use several of the others.

One thing I hate is my current employer's culture of referring to people as 'resources'. I am not a lump of coal or a gallon of oil thank you very much. It took me quite a while to figure out that 'allocating resources' was a euphemism for 'reorganizing', which is itself a euphemism for 'firing some dead weight'.

Meh, I disagree. I think prestigious universities have a reason to criticize sloppy/cliched/just plain annoying language. Did you not read Brave New World? The words we use are the thoughts we think.

I might agree with you though, on "take away." I find it annoying but it is less rude than the more straightforward, "What is your point?"

At least we now know the words and phrases that can annoy the most individuals most of the time. The net-net is that it can be valuable. However, the bottom line is that it is a challenge to use them in a value added way.

My take away from this article is that its a space filler. It was a slow news day and/or his real news sources were out of pocket.

You know what I mean?

Oh well, if this is the worst we will have to deal with today, its going to be a good day.

"challenge". So many people have installed this regex in their speech centers I wanna cap 'em with a pipe wrench:

    s/problem|issue|difficulty|flaw|bug|shit don't work/challenge/g

An annual favorite of mine: Lake Superior State University Banished Words List (http://www.lssu.edu/banished/)

Really on target!

Do you really think our software for detecting voting rings is this primitive?

On that topic, how do you handle the case where a user registers a dozen accounts and then uses them all to vote up his 'main' account? Are IPs tracked or something?

Or is this something I could find out by looking an the source you released for this site?

The abuse protection code looks at a bunch of things. IP addrs are the easiest, but it also looks at others. Sorry I can't go into more detail.

great piece

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