Month: June 2008

“Stakeholder the tool …”

Devolution toward Simpler, Nouns, Verbs

I saw this in an email message yesterday.

Problem:
“Stakeholder” is not a verb.

Explanation:
“Stakeholder the tool within the organization.” was the full sentence in the email message, which was describing a software application and was written to persons who, according to the message’s author, should feel that they had a stake in the software application’s success.

The problem is that the word “stakeholder” is a noun, not a verb.

The word “stakeholder” means a person or group with an interest in something (e.g., the stakes of a wager).

I believe that this (mis)use of the noun “stakeholder” as a verb is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis, just as the misuse of the verb “install” as a noun in place of the longer words “installer” and “installation” is consistent with this hypothesis.

Solution:
“Create stakeholders in the tool …”

“Resiliency” vs. “Resilience”

Nouns, Versus

I was wondering the other day about these two words.

Problem:
The two words mean exactly the same thing, but people don’t use one or the other consistently.

Explanation:
As defined by Wikipedia, “resilience” means the property of a material to absorb energy when it is deformed elastically.

Wikipedia automatically redirects to the “resilience” page when a visitor puts “resiliency” in the search box and clicks the [Go] button.

Similarly, Dictionary.com defines “resiliency” as resilience.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (without the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “resilience” — 12,800,000 matches
  • “resiliency” — 3,770,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors favor “resilience” over “resiliency” by a ratio of 3.40:1.

Solution:
Use “resilience” instead of “resiliency” because the latter is more difficult to say and to be understood and because it means the former.

Second, then Third, then First

Common English Blunders

This post is about courtesy, not necessarily about grammar.

Let’s look at a couple of rules of courtesy:

  1. It’s courteous to put the listener first.
  2. It’s courteous to put others ahead of you.

Unfortunately, it is becoming increasingly common to hear both of these rules violated, especially by younger speakers of American English.

Examples of sloppy speech:

  • “Me and you can go to the store now.” is sloppy for two reasons: (a) it does not put the listener first; (b) it uses the wrong first-person pronoun (“me” instead of “I”).
  • “Jim, Mary, you and I should leave now.” is sloppy because it puts the listener second.
  • “Send it to myself and Bob.” is sloppy for two reasons: (a) it puts the speaker ahead of the third person (“Bob”); (b) it uses the wrong first-person pronoun (“myself” instead of “me”).
  • “I and they want the green paint.” is sloppy because it puts speaker before the third party (“they”).

Here is how the above rules of courtesy get translated into grammatical terms:

  • If you are including your listener in your statement, put him or her — “second person” — first.
  • Then, if you are including others in your statement, put him, her or them — “third person” — second.
  • Finally, if you are including yourself in your statement, put yourself — “first person” — third.

Following these rules, we get these corrected examples:

  • “You and I can go to the store now.”
  • “You, Jim, Mary and I should leave now.”
  • “Send it to Bob and me.”
  • “They and I want the green paint.”

Summarizing the rules in grammatical terms, we get this order in which to put the people within a list in a statement:

  1. Second person
  2. Third person
  3. First person