Words, usages, and phrases that annoy the shit out of you...

my office is a wellspring of trendy nonprofit jargon gobblygook, but they seem to have finally stopped using 'learnings' in lieu of takeaways..

'So what learnings did we take from the conference?' drove me fucking bananas

Lessonings and Learnings

oh and everybody's a goddamn 'stakeholder' as well

Andy, I yearn longingly for the cuddly nonprofit jargon when I get into a workplace where the jargon is either too military ("after-action") or too sportsy ("playbook").

my team is not so bad, except when my boss says 'awesome sauce' in zoom calls

I usually sleep through the early all-staff zoom meetings, so I'm probably missing out on the newest jargon abuses

oh and everybody's a goddamn 'stakeholder' as well

― Andy the Grasshopper, Friday, September 23, 2022 5:09 PM (yesterday)

i often hear this / read about this in nonprofit articles and discussions on social media, and I envision a group of people wearing pastels standing in a circle holding stakes and discussing who is going to actually kill the vampire lying in the center of the circle

also on the jargon front, things I don't feel like hearing anymore: "emotional labor" and "unicorn" (as used to congratulate oneself for one's specialness and uniqueness) -- I am at the point where I want them to recuperate "snowflake" as a positive.

sorry, it's been a while ... PIPELINE ... except when referring to literal pipes

when i hear the words "{X} much?" (like e.g. "jealous much?" or "triggered much?") i reach for my revolver

^^^^^

thz to some work i didn't in the end land i discovered that "creative" is now also the noun the the specific work produced by the "creative" (aka the creator and the created have fused)

also that to "conquest" is now a verb

obviously i greatly like both these developments and shd really post them in a thread that signals approval rather than raging cope them but i also have too much fun making ilx seethe… so enjoy! consider yrselves conquested

thz <--

dogfooding

karl you just made that up

i wish that i had made it up. it is an ilx first mention. it came from an internal Meta memo that expressed disappointment that their metaverse sucks so badly that even their own employees don't want to use it. "dogfooding" is the practice of using your own products or services. i guess it's something

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/6/23391895/meta-facebook-horizon-worlds-vr-social-network-too-buggy-leaked-memo

A key issue with Horizon’s development to date, according to Shah’s internal memos, is that the people building it inside Meta appear to not be using it that much. “For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly,” he wrote to employees on September 15th. “Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”

In a follow-up memo dated September 30th, Shah said that employees still weren’t using Horizon enough, writing that a plan was being made to “hold managers accountable” for having their teams use Horizon at least once a week. “Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it. Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community.”

employees, your mission is to love this dogshit product, and i order you to produce better results on our dogfooding dashboards

Apparently, "Homecoming" is now known as "HoCo".

"dogfooding" is truly gross

i think steve jobs invented it? or gets credit for inventing it? though his phrase was "eat your own dogfood"

oh oh i have one

"maker"

steve jobs: "think different"
steve jobs: "eat your own dogfood"

yeah maker sucks

Also 'creative' is a term for people that don't actually have a specific skill - architecture, knitting, ju-jitsu - but wish they did

Does Zuck actually use Horizon outside of appearing in corny promo videos? I'd love to see his dogfooding dashboard, what kind of dogfood he regularly dines on

it's really funny to imagine top executive leadership doing their meetings in the metaverse, talking about how much they love it

talking about how much they love it because it would cost them what their job is worth to say anything else

Also 'creative' is a term for people that don't actually have a specific skill - architecture, knitting, ju-jitsu - but wish they did

― Andy the Grasshopper, Friday, October 7, 2022 5:56 PM (two hours ago

haha wait, are you listening in to my internal monologue? ... I have made peace with "maker" (after maybe a decade of annoyance) ... at least it doesn't have the condescending and exploitative context of "creative" ... if a techdad wants to consider himself a "maker" for painting star wars models in his garage or experimenting with DIY beermaking, or idk, customizing skateboards, it is less awful than "creative" ... maybe these two will meld and there will be the new noun of "funmaker"

maker is a bad word the exact same way teacher is a bad word tbf

abdabs at english operating as it normally does and should lol, oh no a verb was converted into a noun, we must allow literally no way for this to happen

it's really funny to imagine top executive leadership doing their meetings in the metaverse, talking about how much they love it

― Karl Malone, Friday, October 7, 2022 9:03 PM (yesterday)

I first heard the term dogfooding from a Google employee who was telling me how absurdly difficult it was to book a conference room due to the reservation & access system they were dogfooding at his building

xp I don't think nouning a verb is the basis of objections to "maker"

Nouning

lolling

the villain: let me find a straightforward way to describe and generalise activity in my own sector
this thread: we must allow literally no way for this to happen (doesn't apply to me)

phraseshitting? 🤔

There’s something twee about maker is perhaps the objection. Twee is perhaps not the word but you’ll get what I mean by telepathy.

the villain: let me find a straightforward way to describe and generalise activity in my own sector

which hated term are you talking about here? Maker or creative or both?

the issue i have with 'maker' and 'creative' is they describe things that literally make us human and are what we would be doing a lot more of if we didn't have to deal with 8 hours of soulcrushing, inane 'real' 'jobs' every day. but these regular human activities need a badge-of-honor catchphrase in order to be established as real, viable and allowable activities in the all-consuming ontology of capitalism.

wait till you hear abt writers

Also twee. Call them wordsmiths.

Scribblers

https://www.indiewire.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/joker-movie.jpg

im going to become the maker

In the US, I tend to think of "maker" as supposed opposite of "taker"---although it's been pointed out that many officially Live Free Or Die-type Red States are actually dependent on evil Feds because of so many tax cuts to the rich etc. So the term gets guilted (noun to verb!) by too-frequent association.

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/bridgeopedia/images/0/01/Lower_Trenton_Bridge3.jpg

wait till you hear abt writers

― mark s, Saturday, October 8, 2022 5:15 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

fair lol

poopsocking tbh

Maker is only acceptable in reference to giant sandworms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makar

Middle Scots makar (plural makaris) is the equivalent of Middle English maker. The word functions as a calque (literal translation) of Ancient Greek term ποιητής (poiētēs) "maker; poet".

Scribblers

Ink-stained wretches

“a creative” actually does mean a skilled person ime? a video editor or a copywriter or a designer usually? “maker” self-employed, a by-hand, computerless type of production. both terrible words obv

Just call them all 'the talent'.