New frontiers in grammar

Posted on April 19, 2005 by Charles Kuffner

One way you can tell you’re at an IT conference – in particular, one way you can tell you’re attending a keynote address by a CEO – is by the creative use of nouns as verbs. Today’s entry: “de-risked”, as in “We’ve de-risked the deployment process”. I nearly de-seated myself when I heard that one. And to think, it’s only Day One.

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6 Responses to New frontiers in grammar

  1. William Hughes says:
    April 19, 2005 at 8:20 am

    It amazes me how people in IT create new words to suit their needs. Recently, we hired an outside consultant to rewrite our manuals. The highlight of the proposed revisions was the use of the word “updation” as in “The Updation of a Record”. At first I was laughing, but as one of colleagues pointed out, this document is supposed to represent how we do our jobs.

    I guess in your case, CEO stands for Crazy English Orator. (I really tried with this one, but that’s the best I could do under the circumstances).

  2. B. K. Oxley (binkley) says:
    April 19, 2005 at 8:51 am

    I’m not certain attending an IT conference counts as “See, I do have a life!”. 🙂

  3. Danil says:
    April 19, 2005 at 10:08 am

    De-fenestration certainly seems called for.

    In high school assemblies, the student audience was fierce in its ridicule of improper grammar by speakers. I’d love to see a CEO try to pull that crap in the old auditorium.

  4. Ken says:
    April 19, 2005 at 12:03 pm

    What a horrid new example of what I call the stupiding of the English language.

  5. Dave says:
    April 19, 2005 at 3:44 pm

    Ken: shouldn’t that be the “de-smarting” of the English language?

  6. julia says:
    April 20, 2005 at 7:52 am

    I have to tell you, dear, that while it’s a very bad example, it doesn’t worry as much as your filing an instance of verbing by a CEO giving the keynote address at an IT conference under See, I do have a life!

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