Writer's Block: Are you incentivized?
Apr. 26th, 2010 05:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redfiona99[Error: unknown template qotd]
I don't mind words, such as incentivise, because while they annoy me, it's not like I'm not guilty of doing horrible, horrible things to the language myself. As a scientist, I use 'solubilise' sometimes, which drives my Mother batty, because, as she says, 'to make soluble' is a perfectly fine way of saying it.
Buzz phrases on the other hand, make me rabid, because very often they're not just someone using a quick bit of verbal shorthand like the words are, but someone showing that, while they may or may not be a perfectly decent person, they don't put any thought into what they're saying or they want to be one of the in-gang who use one of 'modern phrases'. There are, of course, exceptions to this. The man that runs the lab next to ours is far, far too fond of 'let's touch base', and that really is just him not paying attention to what he's saying, but only because he's got 50000 other things on his mind at the same time.
I don't mind words, such as incentivise, because while they annoy me, it's not like I'm not guilty of doing horrible, horrible things to the language myself. As a scientist, I use 'solubilise' sometimes, which drives my Mother batty, because, as she says, 'to make soluble' is a perfectly fine way of saying it.
Buzz phrases on the other hand, make me rabid, because very often they're not just someone using a quick bit of verbal shorthand like the words are, but someone showing that, while they may or may not be a perfectly decent person, they don't put any thought into what they're saying or they want to be one of the in-gang who use one of 'modern phrases'. There are, of course, exceptions to this. The man that runs the lab next to ours is far, far too fond of 'let's touch base', and that really is just him not paying attention to what he's saying, but only because he's got 50000 other things on his mind at the same time.
