A Marriage Proposal Spoken in Office Jargon
I have a long-time friend who, after years in fintech, now sometimes speaks this way unironically in non-work situations. I mean, I still think he's a good guy overall but when he recommends the DND party splits up to maximize ROI on a spell rather than just say "let's split up", it does make me cringe.
It's actually a useful device when you like to pull an analogy. Instead of explaining the whole idea, you throw a jargon and everyone constructs the rest in their head and understand it and know how to work with it. The whole point of jargon is to have precise definitions, so it works as a rails and compression for ideas.
Jargon like that in the link makes the message less precise and more meaningless, in my view.
Just simply state what you mean. Let the other person ask questions if they need clarification.
That's good when you explain something technical to a layman, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about explaining non-technical issue to a technical person using jargon for analogy.
For example you can use P2P to explain how some gossip spread or you can say that your relationship with SO is like UDP recently.
So it's low latency and fast but in some contexts, firewalled?
It's like can't tell if she heard you
How is "like UDP" clearer than just saying that?
It's not clearer, it's deeper. It implies a state and creates an image in the listeners mind. You can throw it casually when explaining something and your audience now has an image in their head so you can explain the actual thing you are after.
Jargons are shortcuts to pre-agreed ideas. Just a tool.
In this case, I assure you it does not add depth, clarity, images. You're just using it as a kind of in-group joke.
I agree: it's absolutely an in-group joke. Maybe not joke, but a cutesy in-group way of expressing something.
Certainly someone who gets it will, well, get it. But in general it seems like a lot of effort in most cases to gauge whether or not the recipient will understand at the level you hope. Even the UDP example could be misunderstood by someone who is well-versed. Unreliable? A good low-level thing to build stuff on top of? These are both plausible meanings, but would convey very different things.
Better to just use clear language.
It means that you are not the intended audience because you know too much or too little about UDP.
Once I had a physicist friend freak out over my use of "exponential" to loosely explain something because he instantly began thinking about edge cases and obviously using "logarithmic" would have been more precise. We were not on the same page with the jargon, but then again I guess it requires social skills too so that you can pick where the analogy starts and ends.
I think the udp example is a counterexample personally.
"Hmm udp, so ...unreliable and...hmm...but high throughput?...hm, good to build stuff on top of?"
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, yet I know exactly what udp is.
If you just meant "unreliable", how was this better than just saying that?
It means that we are not on the same page with that and should not be used. With jargon, audience is everything.
Also, you use it in context. The jargon becomes illustrative for the analogy, not precise definition. After all, human can't have UDP connection.
> If you just meant "unreliable", how was this better than just saying that?
It's not. Well, if the person you're talking to happens to get the intended meaning immediately, it's a cute in-joke. To me, that's the only real (dubious) benefit.
I mean, if you describe a relationship in terms of a protocol, sure, you're giving an interesting signal about the relationship, but probably not what you intended to say.
There is no single "just simply" though. All communication is based on an (inherently fallible) estimate of the recipient's mental-state, priorities, and knowledge-base.
For example, "I would like one head of lettuce" is a kind of jargon-lite for "I would like one portion of the fully-grown plant known as lettuce which is found above-ground as a connected unit in nature." Which one leads to a "simpler" exchange will depend on your assumptions about the recipient.
Except that "one head of lettuce" is a widely-known "measure" that most people are going to understand.
Most of this business-speak jargon is incomprehensible to people who haven't heard it before in the workplace. It seems "normal" to people like us here on HN because most of us have interacted with these sorts of business types (or are even one of them), but I would guess that most of the people who know what a head of lettuce represents would have no idea what ROI or noun-form "solve" means.
Jargon is everywhere but office jargon is its own sub genre.
For office jargon, it's maybe not a practical matter, but I could see a friend being a little put off by someone speaking in office jargon to them. Office jargon is sort of impersonal by design
IMHO office jargon is just as useful but because it's not technical its harder to adjust.
>Office jargon is sort of impersonal by design
That's one of it's functions. Instead of going over each time that the thing happening isn't personal and shouldn't be taken as such, you can utilize the jargon to keep it clean. After all, it's just a job where everyone tries to play their role to produce something. It hurts much more badly if you confuse the office work for a social interaction and things don't pan out at some point.
Jargon is as much about social signaling as anything else.
Consider Cockney Rhyming Slang, which is intended to be insider-only speech.
Consider the rise and then mass-adoption of Valley Girl.
> The whole point of jargon is to have precise definitions
Well, not always. Per Webster:
1: the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group
2: obscure and often pretentious language marked by circumlocutions and long words
It would be great if it were only (1) but I’d often (2)
Jargon feels like 1 for the ingroup and 2 for the outgroup.
These are some effects of a jargon but the reason for its existence is precision. You learn it in an institution and then you are on the same page and there's no ambiguity over its meaning. Using jargon with a layperson is useless and could be stupid or pretentious.
> but the reason for its existence is precision
In some cases yes, but the majority of the time jargon is primarily used as a shibboleth to establish group identity, camaraderie, and a sense of exclusivity.
I don't know why is this obsession over jargon. I know the cliche, it's not true at all except when you misuse it. Maybe can be used as part of a fraud or some power move or something like that but its intended use case is a shortcut to predefined ideas. It may have side effects but that doesn't mean that those side effects are the reason to exist.
I am making an empirical statement. The majority of its actual use in life is to achieve social/political ends, not to improve communication. If you want to say the majority of its use is misuse, fine. But the misuse is intentional.
[delayed]
I disagree entirely, jargon use is to help us from keeping defining things so we can move on the next problem. How do you even use "unsprung weight" or "distributed cache" for social or political ends? Maybe it can be used at some cringe encounter with layperson but that's not at all what jargon is used for.
These 1 and 2 are pretty much always apply at the same time.
Wherever 1 or 2 applies just depends on how used you're to the usage of said jargon.
Office jargon in particular fulfills a social signalling role rather than a clear communication role. It's intended to tell upper management: "I'm one of you guys, please look kindly upon me and maybe promote me!" But there's a dynamic similar to that of "U" English vs. "non-U English"[0], as upper management is more likely to say things like "Just get the fucking thing shipped. Our business depends on it."
[0] It turns out that in England, upper-class aspirants are likely to use posher phrases and idioms than actual upper-class people, as the latter are aware of their own and others' social status and have no need for verbal affectations to communicate it. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
Yeah and an "artifact" of that "compression" is the "signal" that "you're a dork"
Jargon should be used only with the appropriate audience, obviously.
At least post-mortems are filled with dead carcass.
This happens to engineers too, it sucks. I say throughput way too often in casual conversation.
I un-ironically do that too in my personal relationships after many years in start-ups.
Sorry if it's offensive!
I think ROI is getting into standard vernacular. I’ve had someone use the term in the bedroom regarding certain positions.
It's all fun and games until they bring out the scrum board
I'm not sure I'm Agile enough for that.
Is ROI pronounced “roy” or “are oh eye”?
Actually it's "uh-voyd youz-ing in so-shul si-tu-a-shuns"
“are oh eye”
"wah"
est mort
everyone knows you must maximize spellholder value
It’s your magiciary duty
I’m ded
The swarm takes 5 rightsizing damage.
This makes me want to have someone make a "Consultomancer" as a class just to read the spell descriptions.
There's a whole TTRPG called "Murders & Acquisitions" as a possible option to scratch that itch.
Hah fantastic. I need to use this somewhere.
> maximize spellholder value
This is such a magnificent phrase and I don't think it will ever get enough credit
When I proposed to my wife, I met her after a couple of years and didn't know at the time if she was seeing someone. I nudged the conversation towards that topic and once I found out that she isn't, I literally proposed to her in office jargon. I said, "So if the vacancy is still available, can I apply?". She said yes, and we got married eventually but she still isn't too happy about that proposal line.
So, if I get it right... You didn't meet that woman for years. You meet her, subtly ask if she's alone, then propose?
That was bold of you, but even bolder from her to accept.
Yeah, I'm confused by this to. Did they not even date first, or was this how they asked her out?
And I thought my 'If I was asking you to marry me, what would be your answer?' was the lowest (well, probably is, yet we have children. And we are married too).
I was about to say I was suprised she ended up as your wife after that.
To be frank: That is among worst possible lines you could've come up with, but glad it still worked out for you XD
I'd like to think I minimize the bleedover of corporate/profession-related speech into my daily life, but "orthogonal" and "non-trivial" were just not a standard part of my vocabulary before college. Over a decade later, I find myself saying them a lot.
Ways to say: 1. "that's not what we're talking about" and 2. "this is fucking important you idiot"
are always valuable :D
That sounds more like maths jargon that has bled into office speak (to my delight, but I'm a mathematician).
Those are words I use a lot and I was starting to wonder if I the office jargon was bleeding too much on my personal life. Then I read your comment and realised I started using them after attending a math course at the University. I loved my teacher. Thanks for the memories.
> I'd like to think I minimize the bleedover of corporate/profession-related speech into my daily life, but "orthogonal" and "non-trivial" were just not a standard part of my vocabulary before college. Over a decade later, I find myself saying them a lot.
As a mathematician, both of those terms are common in my technical and, therefore, everyday speech. If it helps, feel free to think of yourself, not as using corporate speech, but as using technical mathematical terms.
The use of "orthogonal" is now common in SCOTUS oral arguments, both from the practitioners and the justices. Not infrequent in the intermediate appellate courts either. I do an imaginary eye roll whenever I hear it in those contexts.
Why? The entire point of a court case is to settle an argument over a specific case or controversy. So if something is orthogonal or tangential (pick your math metaphor), that means something.
That makes me wary. As any mathematician knows, "trivial" means solvable. "Nontrivial" means no one has solved it yet, but no one knows any good reason why it shouldn't be solvable in principle. And "decidedly nontrivial" means no one has a fucking clue whether it's solvable or not; best not try, unless you're Terence Tao or somebody, then... maybe.
So if I were your boss and you came to me casually describing a problem as "nontrivial" I'd be like... "so is the time frame gonna be years or decades?"
That's pretty much exactly what it means in software too? A trivial task is one that you think you know how to do. A nontrivial problem is one which sounds like it should be doable, but you don't immediately know what steps will be required, and until you look into it further it may take anywhere from days to decades.
"Trivial" in software means easy. So "non-trivial" just means not easy. As such whether or not something actually is trivial or not will vary person to person.
Another classic in this genre: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/a-deep-dive-to-...
in a slightly different vein: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/i-work-from-hom...
> OPERATOR: O.K., Robert, you understand that what you just described isn’t really lunch, right?
> ROBERT: It is lunch. When there are no rules, it is lunch, Cherise!
> OPERATOR: Did you at any point dip the green peppers in the peach yogurt?
> ROBERT: Probably. Sorry.
>dip the green peppers in the peach yogurt
Reminds me of that Bloodhound Gang song
Woof, this one hit a little too close to home
This is incredible. The quality of the writing is on another level, it's not just about throwing corporate jargon but weaving it through a nicely written piece. Thank you for sharing, looking forward to reading more comments from you.
Regards, AA
Hadn't seen this one before, it's great.
>As 6:30 P.M. rolled around, she felt sick in the pit of her stomach, like when she looked at a sentence that didn’t contain an acronym.
I have queries and doubts on the proposed union. See attached ticket. Please do the needful.
You joke, but I know an actual couple that has a “family” Jira instance. They have tickets for household todo items like “Paint fence”.
I’m not sure about performance reporting but I think overall velocity has gone down despite their team size growing in recent years. I think the new members aren’t contributing much yet in the way of story points.
I worked with a sysadmin that did this for his kids, and even moved chore assignments around automatically based on grades (which he scraped from some school portal). Get a D and you'll have to do your sister's chores!
I find in this situation that new member onboarding can unfortunately take years
Does that couple also work at the same company as product managers?
Ticket includes one (1) proposal of conjugal union. Action this.
That's proper corporate speak, not so much office jargon. One note: to table in the UK means to put it to vote/address, rather than "put it under the rug"
In Robert's Rules (of Parliament Procedure), which are kind of the "base level" in US corporate politics, "to table" means to "send [back] to committee" in part coming from the idea of physically collecting all the debate notes so far and setting them aside on a table for the committee to collect to take to their next meeting in order to (try to) address concerns.
In Robert's Rules to address something is to "motion" it, with "call to vote" being a common sub-type of a motion to make. (Generally addressed to "the chair" of the meeting, or asking for wider debate from "the floor", so sometimes something might be "chaired" or "floored" to imply a vote/address, but usually "motion".)
The default vote in Robert's Rules is a show of hands or a verbal "aye"/"nay"/"abstain". It takes extra work to motion for a paper or ballot vote. I'm curious if the UK jargon for "table" is as much a difference/switch in that default among UK parliamentary procedure? More paper votes would involve more tables, if that were the case, so that would maybe explain things.
I noticed 'low hanging fruit' here is used differently than I'm used to. Where I've worked it always meant 'a task that is easy to get done'
Huh, I'm in the UK and certainly every time one of my workmates has said "to table" something it's meant "let's stop fucking talking about this now"
Adjacent News Radio Marriage Proposal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-yGUSRdNG4
I was reminded of that when reading, went to look it up on Youtube, clicked share, came back here to see if anyone had left a comment... "search news radio" yep... glance at the query... 'v=y-y...' Yep.
I highly recommend this clip.
Congratulations! I hate it. You did forget to include my person pet peeve—learnings.
We already have a word for that—lessons.
There has only been one company I've worked for where 'learnings' was used extensively. It was Swedish. Not sure if that is relevant.
Here's a classic: https://professionalsuperhero.com
If you don’t get the joke, you may be a product manager
I haven't worked in an office in over three years. I sometimes think I miss it but now I no longer don't.
Brilliant! But two phrases I was hoping to see weren't there: "reach out" and "embrace."
That would be subsequent to presenting a clearer ROI case across foreseeable quarters
Get a slack channel you two
You mean, they did not book that conference room?
Start with the 'Wedding' epic in Jira. Add a few spikes to figure out the details and bring those into the current sprint.
I recently retired early from a large, F100 valley tech company and there are a few things I miss. But this is definitely something I will never miss!
This is ripe for a Krazam adaptation.
This is one of those Krazam clips I simply must watch again every time someone links to it.
Another is the one about Omega Star (whose team still haven't got their shit together and implemented ISO dates like they said they would!).
Take this offline, you two
After we double click
Sounds like a pair of Corporate SEALs! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUtL6IS7wcY
Is "solves" used like that in the wild? Haven't heard that one.
Solid but could have double-clicked on Excel and Powerpoint more to complete the roadmap.
Not believable, didn't read "double click"
I threw up in my mouth a little.
"I had a visceral reaction that was less than favorable"
> we can action on our solve
This causes me physical pain.
See also "Mission Statement" by Weird Al: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4
I give them twelve quarters...
In the middle ages, all of Europe could hide behind Latin . . .
Solves, asks, learnings.
It was a surprise when I discovered just how much negativity and frustration wells up in me when I see verbs turn into nouns when there are already perfectly serviceable nouns available.
I am motivated to passive aggressively retaliate by turning even more verbs into unnecessary nouns: seeings, helpings, deliverings, discussings, respondings.
Calvin and Hobbes - January 25, 1993 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25
Calvin: I like to verb words.
Hobbes: What?
Calvin: I like to verb words I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember When "Access" was a thing? Now it's something you do. It got verbed.
Calvin: Verbing weirds language.
Hobbes: Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.
I imagined Gary as Ira Glass and Cindy as Jen Psaki. I could make it only about halfway before I threw up a little.
It reads like a script from Succession.
[ Runs off screaming into the woods ]
GARY: Hey Cindy, remember last week when we were debugging that system design issue?
CINDY: Yeah, we got some pretty elegant solutions out of that sprint.
GARY: Exactly. That got me thinking: our relationship feels like a system that’s not just functional—it’s optimized.
CINDY: Oh? I’d like to hear your use case for that.
GARY: Well, I’ve run some simulations, and the output is consistent. You’re my primary key, Cindy. The stability and scalability of our relationship are off the charts.
CINDY: That’s a strong endorsement, Gary. I’ve been analyzing our feedback loops, and I feel the same way. You’ve really reduced my latency and maximized my throughput.
GARY: So I figured it’s time to push to production. In addition to all the features we’ve developed, I’d like to add one more. (He takes a knee and pulls out a ring.) Cindy, will you marry me?
CINDY: I will, Gary! This takes our architecture to the next level.
GARY: Marriage is a big commit, but I think we’ve got the bandwidth to make it work.
CINDY: Absolutely. But we need to stay agile, especially during our onboarding phase.
GARY: Agreed. I’ll make sure to stay in sync during our sprints.
CINDY: Good. Because I have one non-negotiable: we need to maintain a clean codebase.
GARY: Let’s unpack that.
CINDY: My last relationship had too many tech debts. Every time I tried to refactor, there was pushback. It was impossible to iterate.
GARY: Sounds like a monolithic mess.
CINDY: It was. But with you, it’s different. You’re modular, efficient, and your logic is rock-solid. I just want to make sure we keep things lightweight and maintainable.
GARY: I couldn’t agree more. We’ll keep our dependencies up-to-date and document everything thoroughly.
CINDY: Perfect. Let’s set up a shared repository to start planning our roadmap.
GARY: Done. I’ll draft an RFC tonight so we can align on our deliverables.
CINDY: Great. Just flag me if you hit any blockers.
GARY: Will do. And Cindy? Thank you for being my forever stack overflow.
CINDY: And thank you for being the solution to all my edge cases.
C'mon, don't just paste the content into the comments. The site doesn't have a paywall and from what I can see with a fresh browser window without ad blocker turned on there's no adverts aside from a request for subscriptions / becoming a patron.
It's not the linked article content. It's an even more audience-tailored version that I assume they made up, for our amusement.
That's not the original content on the site
Reminds me of a George Saunders story, though it's missing the horror element.
oh, I think the horror element is there.
Really? Nobody is getting kicked to death.
In my former communist dictatorship country, we had a term for how the party officials spoke.
"Wooden language".
Applies very much to this too.
I thought they were going to show this:
That's what first came to mind as well.
For those not familiar / context, NewsRadio, Negotiation, S2E8 1995:
<https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0660208/quotes/>
<https://breezewiki.pussthecat.org/newsradio/wiki/Negotiation>
See also: A PowerPoint Proposal by Don McMillan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGiePuNFXwY
Wow, really impactful share! I feel like I got some great take-aways and learnings from this.
If I had to listen to this sort of shit on a daily basis I think I'd begin to understand why you all over the water are upset about the prospect of people taking away your big shooty guns.
> why you all over the water are upset about the prospect of people taking away your big shooty guns
All over the water? Ducks. It's the ducks. Ducks are the enemy. Unless we defend ourselves, the ducks will sap us of our natural vital fluids!
It's funny, but it sounds more like corporate/management speak than office jargon.
Employees, when no managers are present, seldom talk to each other like this. Sometimes, the way we actually speak to each other, would get us fired if someone from management was eavesdropping.
I worked at a place where line employees talked like this to each other all the time. It was maddening. In particular, whenever the word "use" might be used, everybody at this company used the word "leverage" instead. They leveraged a piece of toilet paper to wipe their ass with. Madness! I felt like I was from space, like, am I the only one who sees how silly this is?
But again, this sort of jargon serves a social signalling function. It's metacommunication, not first-order communication. It's intended to suggest "I'm a true and honest member of the business class and should be taken seriously in business affairs."
here is a more direct proposal to contrast: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3GlKd5DOJLE
hahahaha. so good. so terrible.
I think I could be alone, but one of my biggest office-speak pet peeves is using verbs as nouns.
Like “ask” (I hear this one all the time), “(value) add”, and “solve” (used in this article - I cringed).
I see this a lot on HN too, so again, many others here will obviously not agree. But I’ll intentionally use “request” or “question” over “ask” just in protest.
I know the English language has been using some verbs as nouns for millennia, but there are particular ones (like the ones above) that I mostly hear at the office (or outside the office, but spoken by “office folk”), and it’s definitely an annoy.
>and it’s definitely an annoy.
You didn't have to do it to drive the point home, but boy did this do the job.
> boy
And nouns as interjections.
I find that happens to me too (getting annoyed), but it's a good reminder to introspect when it happens. Clearly, there's nothing objectively wrong with actually using these words in their new meanings-- they're completely serviceable in their new usages, and clear too. There's some degree to which all people get annoyed with language changing and feel a conservative impulse to put a stop to it, but the annoyance with office jargon in particular seems to go beyond that. The source of our annoyance is thus revealed to be something else. I have a feeling it comes back to, like so many things, status games. Someone using new terminology that was just invented is (probably incidentally) asserting some kind of status one-upsmanship over you, demonstrating in passing they are more familiar with cultural norms. I wonder if my annoyance is actually stemming from insecurity that the other person is exactly right-- I am falling behind in the invisible status games. I can either accept my loss, try to adapt to it by using it myself, or remind myself of how little I really care about these status games.
Most of these words seem to be intentionally ineloquent. It's almost as though they were invented or first used by someone who is rich but illiterate. Or that the words were invented specifically to be "accessible" in some way.
Imagine getting a degree in English and then learning as an adult that an "ask" is modern jargon for a request, that a "learning" is a lesson, and an "add" is a differentiator. Business English always seems to involve a narrowing of the lexicon.
I think what grates on me the most -- deservedly or not -- is that these particular words only end up being used this way in "business speak". I find business-type people to be profoundly annoying (shallow, surface-level/transactional relationships, etc.). For me, the fact that this is a business-speak phenomenon automatically makes it eye-roll-worthy by association.
It goes the other way too, nouns as verbs, and just as cringy: "you can solution this", "we need to action that".
Both ways come from subtle manipulation of language. "Ask" sounds like a polite word while "request" sounds demanding, so the former gets used even if it's the wrong word class. "Lesson" sounds harsh while a "learning" sounds positive. The word that gets used is whichever frames the speaker or conversation better, making them sound more courteous or cooperative and nudging the recipient towards complying.
To me there are semantic distinctions. If I say there was a request, it's neutral. If i say there was an ask, you know I think it's something a bit bigger, possibly a bit unreasonable. If I say there was a question, you know it's just information being sought.
The article here points out the more annoying characteristic, which is using lots of stock phrases that don't contribute meaning over single words.
> “There was an ask.”
This communicates nothing to me other than that the speaker probably is going to continue to annoy me.
same.
and actually A LOT less serious in my mind than a request. If you used request I would think you are really in need of my assistance and I am paying attention. I hear “ask” and I think totally not important and ignorable
> If i say there was an ask, you know I think it's something a bit bigger, possibly a bit unreasonable.
That’s the point - it isn’t any of those things. It’s made up by you (nothing personal, waving in general direction) on the spot and is not in any way a part of some imagined shared lingo. It’s all complete and utter meaningless bs that some people like to imagine to be loaded with contextual depth. It’s not.
Yeah, I'll still just say "large, possibly unreasonable request". :)
(And I've never inferred that distinction anyway -- in all the cases I've heard it, I could've replaced "ask" with "request"/"question", and it would've meant the same thing, especially with any additional context.)
Totally agree. Before I clicked into these comments I was actually just thinking about the single example that irks me the most is "the understand".
Oh wow, that's a new one. Have you really heard that in conversation?
I'm so sorry.
This point come up in every thread about office speak, so rest easy that you are not alone
Learnings.
Reminds me of Gurgi from Lloyd Alexander's Taran books (The Black Cauldron). Makes me giggle.