by "Ash78, voting early and often" (ash78)
Published 05/09/2017 at 12:25
by "Ash78, voting early and often" (ash78)
Published 05/09/2017 at 12:25
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STARS: 0
In all of your various workplaces, clubs, universities, etc, do you have any common pet peeves about language? I don’t mean just the usual business or PC buzzwords, but things that are outright wrong? I spend a lot of time on the phone with people all over the US and the world, but our corporate culture tends to foster the repetition of the same idiosyncrasies over and over again.
I’ll start: If I hear another person pronounce “Processes” as “Process eez” I’m gonna have to choke someone out.
Also, the general business acronym “NAICS” can be said a few different ways (I prefer “Nakes”), but “Nye-acks” just doesn’t work. It’s like hearing people refer to “MACRS” depreciation as “Mark’s.”
"jimz" (jimz)
05/09/2017 at 12:29, STARS: 3
people who call a Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) as a “fee-mah.”
"Azrek" (azrek)
05/09/2017 at 12:30, STARS: 1
I work for the Military and the acronyms we use are amazing. It is a foreign language. I occasionally have to write them down to research what the hell someone said earlier.
"HammerheadFistpunch" (hammerheadfistpunch)
05/09/2017 at 12:31, STARS: 0
This isn’t work related. But this one bugs me. I hear it more often than you would think.
Also, my recent pet peeve at work is people getting my name wrong in emails...EMAILS! My name is IN the address!!!
"benjrblant" (benjblant)
05/09/2017 at 12:33, STARS: 1
“Expresso”
"jimz" (jimz)
05/09/2017 at 12:34, STARS: 1
“Get on TELSAT and tell STAFCON that COMWIMP wants two pepperoni pizzas, on the double!”
"TrustMeImAnEngineer, but I'd rather be an InternationalArtThief" (trusttheengineer)
05/09/2017 at 12:34, STARS: 2
Constantly using the word “utilize” instead of “use”. Yeah it’s not incorrect but it’s so overused just to sound smart.
"jimz" (jimz)
05/09/2017 at 12:35, STARS: 2
"Jcarr" (jcarr)
05/09/2017 at 12:35, STARS: 2
When people say “in regard s to”
"Needmoargarage" (needmoargarage)
05/09/2017 at 12:37, STARS: 0
There are a few that bother me in my workplace. Motor (engine), dampening (damping), and a whole lot of acronym misuse like MIL lamp (MIL). It doesn’t bug me enough to really say anything however.
"HammerheadFistpunch" (hammerheadfistpunch)
05/09/2017 at 12:37, STARS: 0
Bonus points for utilization or utilization rate.
"CB" (jrcb)
05/09/2017 at 12:38, STARS: 2
Fun fact: I changed my Kinja name from JRCB to CB because people couldn’t spell it right. Within a day of that happening, someone called me BC. Such is life.
"MonkeePuzzle" (monkeypuzzle)
05/09/2017 at 12:41, STARS: 0
someone a few cubes over keeps mindlessly and tunelessly whistling. He is unaware, and stops when asked, but starts up again within moments because he has no idea.
I know thats not what you asked, but... GRRR STABBING MYSELF IN THE EARS!
also, TLAs, we use an ENDLESS supply of TLAs
"HammerheadFistpunch" (hammerheadfistpunch)
05/09/2017 at 12:41, STARS: 1
I wouldn’t feel bad if my name was hard, its not...at all.
"benjrblant" (benjblant)
05/09/2017 at 12:41, STARS: 0
MAKE IT STOP
"Ash78, voting early and often" (ash78)
05/09/2017 at 12:45, STARS: 1
How low-brow! It’s “with respect to.” If someone says “about” I just laugh at them.
"Ash78, voting early and often" (ash78)
05/09/2017 at 12:46, STARS: 2
I’m in data (in finance), so we have multiple layers of them. In some cases, everyone stops knowing what they mean because they have a life of their own. And then there’s acronyms OF acronyms, which is awesome.
"crowmolly" (crowmolly)
05/09/2017 at 12:48, STARS: 4
“We’re going to invest in”
OH REALLY?
What kind of return do you expect to see on your “investment”? Cut the BS, you are just spending money.
"Ash78, voting early and often" (ash78)
05/09/2017 at 12:49, STARS: 0
Same here. It’s literally like if you replied to me as “Ahs78.” At first, I figured it was a typo, but now that it happens 30% of the time, I know it’s just stupid.
"SPAMBot - Horse Doctor" (spambot2002)
05/09/2017 at 12:54, STARS: 0
People reply to me in email using the wrong first name ALL. THE. TIME. I have a signature with my name in bold letters, my address uses my name, etc. Apparently Luke and Eric look similar? This happens at least once a month. SMH
"ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com" (ita97)
05/09/2017 at 12:54, STARS: 2
I hate the use of the word “deliverable” and/or “deliverables.” I work in academia, so details and specific language are a thing for us. This is mainly a term I hear used by administrators, which I always take to be an indicator for when they have no understanding of the subject they are talking/writing/making decisions about.
"DasWauto" (DasWauto)
05/09/2017 at 12:58, STARS: 1
In my particular part of rural Canada, it’s ‘heighth’. I’m almost tired of interjecting with a curt ‘heighT’. Almost.
"Ash78, voting early and often" (ash78)
05/09/2017 at 12:59, STARS: 0
I hate it, too, I just haven’t heard a good substitute. It’s just an awkward word. It’s up there with “takeaways” which is a nice way of saying “Here’s a 30 second summary to prove I was paying attention”
"Ash78, voting early and often" (ash78)
05/09/2017 at 13:01, STARS: 1
I hear that almost everywhere, depending on the person speaking. On the subject of measurements, I also hate the mis-use of the ruralism “about 6 foot long.” A 6-foot-long object is 6
feet
long, you can
’
t just interchange them.
"Sweet Trav" (thespunbearing)
05/09/2017 at 13:03, STARS: 3
We sell Mass Dampers as part of our business. You wouldn’t believe how many ENGINEERS call them Damp en ers. They make nothing wet. They provide damping, not dampness. (Yes I know the MW dictionary uses them interchangeably, however no textbook on vibration calls a damper a dampener.)
"Smallbear wants a modern Syclone, local Maple Leafs spammer" (smallbear94)
05/09/2017 at 13:06, STARS: 0
I do this to ESPN and at least one Oppo I can’t remember right now.
"Tripper" (tripe46)
05/09/2017 at 13:07, STARS: 2
I just straight up hate it all. The buzzwords, overuse of words like synergy, committee...The small talk. In meetings when one stupid fuckhead says something and then another stupid fuckhead repeats it changing a few words...I hate my work persona haha.
"Smallbear wants a modern Syclone, local Maple Leafs spammer" (smallbear94)
05/09/2017 at 13:08, STARS: 2
Got one of those people. Utilize, verify, blah blah blah.
If you want to add 15 minutes to your pay without doing any actual work you go ask them a simple yes or no question 20 minutes before quitting time.
"Smallbear wants a modern Syclone, local Maple Leafs spammer" (smallbear94)
05/09/2017 at 13:11, STARS: 0
I can bear it if it’s selling something that really needs to get done to someone who can’t think of any reason why how he’s done “thing x” for 30 years might not be the best way anymore.
Not saying old stuff is bad in general. But there are definitely some things that need the torch.
"Smallbear wants a modern Syclone, local Maple Leafs spammer" (smallbear94)
05/09/2017 at 13:21, STARS: 0
I sent an email addressed to Henrik to a guy named Ivan once. But that was because they used to work at the same place, one left to set up a competing company and I was sending a copy/paste email to both of them.
...without remembering to change the name.
"Ash78, voting early and often" (ash78)
05/09/2017 at 13:22, STARS: 1
Don’t even get me started on the widespread confusion about shocks, springs, and struts. I have heard my indy mechanic use the word “Dampener” and I asked him about it. “It’s really damper, but so many customers say dampener, we just go along with it.”
"Smallbear wants a modern Syclone, local Maple Leafs spammer" (smallbear94)
05/09/2017 at 13:23, STARS: 0
Ew. I’ve heard that one. WHERE ARE THEY GETTING IT FROM
"Steve is equipped with Electronic Fool Injection" (itsalwayssteve)
05/09/2017 at 13:28, STARS: 0
Agreeance. I FUCKING HATE THAT NON-WORD!
"Bryan doesn't drive a 1M" (bryantakespictures)
05/09/2017 at 13:39, STARS: 0
I hadn’t noticed that one before, but now I will, thanks a lot!
"Bryan doesn't drive a 1M" (bryantakespictures)
05/09/2017 at 13:39, STARS: 0
I hadn’t noticed that one before, but now I will, thanks a lot!
"Xyl0c41n3" (i-am-xyl0c41n3)
05/09/2017 at 13:53, STARS: 1
There’s a few I’ve talked about on Oppo before (because I’ve seen them happen here).
I hate when people refer to people as “females” or “males.” I understand it’s pretty much accepted parlance in law enforcement and military environments, which are environments I deal with regularly, so they get a pass. But when my fellow journalists (or average people) do it, it frustrates me to no end. We are women/girls and men/boys. Male and female are, when referring to human beings, adjectives, and should be used sparingly to begin with. For example, it’s technically correct to say something like, “A female doctor” but why? Why not say, “Dr. Sally Smith” or “Sally Smith, an orthopedic surgeon...”?
My biggest pet peeve in regards to the journalism world is hearing “males” or “females” used by TV anchors. It sucks enough to see those terms used incorrectly in print journalism, but even more so in broadcast journalism because broadcast journalism is supposed to sound a LOT more conversational. Whereas most local newspaper writing is supposed to be at somewhere around middle school level, broadcast reporting language is supposed to be around late grade school level.
Another one is using the term “illegal(s)” to apply to people. It is not illegal to be a person. A person who exists cannot be illegal. Their actions can be illegal, but they cannot be. So, an “illegal” is an “undocumented immigrant.” And they are such until such time they have been convicted of entering a country illegally. And even after that point.
Do you call a person who’s gotten a speeding ticket an illegal? What about someone who jaywalked across the street? What about someone who slapped their spouse and got arrested by the cops for simple assault? Do you call any of THOSE people “illegals?” No. Of course not. Those are all misdemeanor charges, btw, as is unlawful entry into the U.S.
I also hate the verb-ification of the word “gift” in place of the proper verb, “to give.” As in, “I was gifted this coffee mug,” or “I’m thinking of gifting my mom a sweater for Christmas.”
"DasWauto" (DasWauto)
05/09/2017 at 13:56, STARS: 1
Differentiating between heigHT and widTH is hard, apparently.
"itschrome" (itschrome)
05/09/2017 at 14:03, STARS: 1
I work in IT.. there’s thousands of examples I could give you.. but the long and short of it is, if you don’t know what your talking about, just don’t talk about it..
"SPAMBot - Horse Doctor" (spambot2002)
05/09/2017 at 14:04, STARS: 1
I’ve done things like that too. If it was every once in a while, no biggie. But it has happened at every job with regularity. haha
"Mr. Plastics powered by GreyGoose" (greygoose)
05/09/2017 at 14:16, STARS: 0
Wrong, call everything a dashpot.
"Corkscrew'd" (corkscrewd)
05/09/2017 at 14:28, STARS: 3
I live near Silicon Valley, so I’m always hearing all kinds of buzzwords that do little other than to describe something mundane and make it sound more exciting.
The word / phrase I hate the most? Disrupt.
“We’re going to disrupt the market with this!” “We’re going to disrupt the process with that!” “This technology is going to disrupt the industry!”
It’s even worse when someone uses the phrase to describe the impact the “disruptive tech” will have. Like a wifi-connected juicer that only juices packs you buy from the distributor.
You didn’t disrupt anything; you just found another way to make money out of people with too much money and not enough sense by convincing them that using a K-cup machine for juicing fruit sponges is way more fun and fulfilling than actually eating a fruit.
"Ash78, voting early and often" (ash78)
05/09/2017 at 14:32, STARS: 1
I’m finally old enough that I feel like I’m witnessing the second tech bubble, but with VCs and investors who didn’t live through the first round and learn from the idiocy. Juicero was (or should have been) doomed from the start. But social media, Kickstarter, etc create unnecessary publicity without the appropriate “peer review” of stupid ideas.
Want more proof: How many sites have a “like” button but no “dislike” button? People’s feedback loop is all skewed.
"Smallbear wants a modern Syclone, local Maple Leafs spammer" (smallbear94)
05/09/2017 at 14:32, STARS: 0
blech
"promoted by the color red" (whenindoubtflatout)
05/09/2017 at 14:41, STARS: 0
Don’t forget “utilizing”. It makes all the documents look important.
"Ash78, voting early and often" (ash78)
05/09/2017 at 14:41, STARS: 0
I never really noticed the male/female thing, but now I’ll probably think about it constantly...thanks!
I despise the term “illegal” as shorthand for a person, but partly because it’s taken on the shorthand connotation of xenophobia. Illegal immigrant sounds a little better, but yes — you can’t modify a person to be illegal. They are either an “Illegally immigrated person” (adverb) or the much simpler “Undocumented...” like you said.
I had never heard the term “gifted” in English, with the exceptions of the term “regifting” or in the context of tax law (“gifting one’s heirs”). Is
Regalar
common in Spanish? I’ve heard mixed opinions. Maybe
dar regalado
or something like that?
"RallyWrench" (rndlitebmw)
05/09/2017 at 14:51, STARS: 2
I run an indy shop, so we deal with loads of acronyms that people constantly get wrong, but that’s predictable. What bugs me the most is when people who communicate in letters and numbers within the industry don’t know the phonetic alphabet. I’m not a military guy, but when a single letter in a part number or VIN can mean a completely different car or part (or a completely different vehicle, location or target for soldiers, how about that!), it needs to be right, and the phonetic alphabet is meant for that. Instead, I have to hear people say “Yeah, that’s, uh... 1... J as in, uhh... John... Oh (ZERO, NOT OH FOR FUCKS SAKE) 123456... Uhh.. M as in Mary. VINs are seventeen digits of torture.
Also, it bugs me when dealer parts people don’t know the format of their own damn numbers. BMW, for example, looks like this: 11 53 7 509 227. The idiots at my local dealer will butcher them like so: 11537, 50, 922, 7.
"Ash78, voting early and often" (ash78)
05/09/2017 at 14:58, STARS: 0
Hahaha. I learned the phonetic alphabet at around age 6 or 7 because my dad is a pilot and I’m a nerd. But to this day, I don’t have to say “N as in Nancy” I just rattle off “November” from deep in the bowels of my head and it all goes much more smoothly. But I don’t say “niner.” That almost got me beaten up in 5th grade.
"Corkscrew'd" (corkscrewd)
05/09/2017 at 15:14, STARS: 0
I’m glad you got the Juicero reference!
In addition to the issue of gaming social media so that support is always visible (making a bad idea look decent), the issue is everyone is trying to innovate everything and see what sticks in an attempt to be the next Oculus, or the next Uber. In that scramble for trying to make it, it seems that sometimes genuinely bad ideas get through simply because a few people want to get rich.
Actually, it’s even worse than that because there are cases where some VC’s and investors would invest in the company knowing it would fail, and then taking the resources for themselves and selling them for the highest bidder. This is why we see trainwrecks like Juicero.
"Ash78, voting early and often" (ash78)
05/09/2017 at 15:29, STARS: 0
Well said...it’s a shell game sometimes, people just want to flip their investments and not be the loser holding the bag at the end (regardless of whether they had real interest in the investment in the first place...or just its marketability to others). It used to be that if you couldn’t get funding through a bank or the SBA, you’d go to VCs or hedge funds and pay a lot more interest or equity for that. But now with crowdfunding, even things that are too risky for VC can still get some traction because nobody is on the hook for a lot — and because the inventors don’t technically even owe their investors anything. That’s a dangerous cycle of accountability.
"Corkscrew'd" (corkscrewd)
05/09/2017 at 16:00, STARS: 1
Yeah, I completely agree.
These days, whenever I look at a startup and then they claim that they’re working on a crowdfunding campaign, I don’t take them as seriously anymore. It’s way too much risk for that unless you have something that you can give backers right away.
This is of course depending on the product. I’ve backed several Kickstarters that have delivered something or other simply because I believed in the product and thought it was something cool. Megabots falls into this category because “hey, fighting mechs!”
Kickstarter was never the same though after the success of Pebble and the Coolest. I mean, look at where they are now: the carcass of Pebble is being picked apart by Fitbit, and The Coolest bungled their distribution and alienated their backers. It’s really hard now to pull off a success like Oculus using Kickstarter. And don’t even get me started on IndieGogo and their “flexible funding” policy.
"yamahog" (yamahog)
05/09/2017 at 16:02, STARS: 2
Yes it is best not to provide engineers with dampness, it could cause chafing.
"gmctavish needs more space" (gmctavish)
05/09/2017 at 17:37, STARS: 0
My name is constantly spelled wrong, often in emails, sometimes even my family members (Extended, not immediate). I’ve mostly stopped correcting people, unless it’s for something official.
"pip bip - choose Corrour" (hhgttg69)
05/10/2017 at 07:43, STARS: 0
we ask panel shops for the last 8 of GM vins yet some still can’t get it right
they’ll give the last 7 or 9, one panel beater (who is nearing retirement age) is hopeless and regularly gives Commodore vins with only 4 digits after the L - Holden Commodore vins are e.g. 9L123456 or CL112233 - L for Elizabeth South Australia, he’ll go 69A2L4156, totally f***ing wrong.
one day i’m going to go over to his shop and throttle him.
"gmporschenut also a fan of hondas" (gmporschenut)
05/10/2017 at 21:30, STARS: 1
Just
There are 2 senior guys that use it all the time. Not in a sense of “we just got back from lunch” but “all you have to do is just balance the forces on the shaft?!?!?!?” It drives us nuts because it belittles whatever task you are following it with.
"Ash78, voting early and often" (ash78)
05/11/2017 at 09:02, STARS: 0
I used to work with this accountant whose catch phrase was “all ya gotta do is...” followed by some oversimplified task that would get him out of what you were politely asking him to do. It worked like the Jedi Mind Trick on my own managers, who would then turn to me like “See, that’s all you gotta do!” (followed by days or weeks of my dabbling in something I have no business doing). It was the ultimate in laziness and redirected accountability.
"Smallbear wants a modern Syclone, local Maple Leafs spammer" (smallbear94)
05/12/2017 at 11:36, STARS: 0
Oh and also “achieve”. There are places where it’s acceptable, but “can you achieve this” (JUST SAY “DO” DAMMIT) and “we can achieve getting this” (HOW IS THIS BETTER THAN JUST SAYING “GET”) are NOT.
In other news
