Month: February 2009

“where we’re at”

Common English Blunders, Devolution toward Simpler, Prepositions

I hear this a lot, often from supposedly educated people.

Problem:
The preposition should not appear in this expression.

Explanation:
The full sentence goes something along the lines of “Let’s see where we’re at in this project.”

Whoever says or writes “where we’re at” is making the common English blunder of applying “where at” — a mistaken way to use “where” — to a location (physical or virtual).

I believe that this expression when spoken is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to say “where we’re at” than to say “where we are”.

Try saying each expression. You will hear and feel what I mean. The words “we’re” and “at” blur together in speech to become a one-and-a-half-syllable “whurrat”. In contrast, the words “we” and “are” must be spoken distinctly.

Given a choice, most speakers will choose 1.5 syllables over two syllables almost any day, especially in informal speech.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “where we are” — 17,400,000 matches
  • “where we’re at” — 479,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct “where we are” versus the incorrect “where we’re at” by a ratio of 36.3-to-1, which is good but not wonderful, especially considering nearly half of a million instances of the incorrect expression.

Solution:
“where we are”

“Be sensitive to those being laid off today.”

Euphemisms

Have you ever worked at a company that has laid off employees, been one of the “lucky ones” in the non-laid-off group, and heard a supervisor say something like this?

I know several people for whom today, because of a layoff, is their final day of employment at a major American company, and this kind of “Be sensitive …” advice came to mind.

Because this particular company has a lot of employees and therefore falls under the WARN Act, the company notified the laid-off employees sixty calendar days ago that today would be their final day of employment there.

The direct implication of “Be sensitive to those being laid off today.” is that those being laid off will be in a worse situation than if they had not been laid off.

The indirect implication of “Be sensitive to those being laid off today.” is that the listener will be in a better situation than those being laid off.

I am sure that at least some of those laid off will be in a worse situation, at least initially.

And anyone who is laid off suffers, at least initially, from another “L” word: loss.

But I believe that the long-term prospect for many is a different “L” word: liberation. After they work through the pain of the loss, many people review their strengths, begin to see new opportunities, and feel liberated.

And the ones who were not laid off, the ones who must now handle the additional tasks previously handled by those where laid off, are effectively told by their supervisors that they are the “lucky ones”.

You have to wonder who is “lucky” and who is not.

One more comment: I prefer “fired” to “laid off”. No matter whether I am laid off or fired, it means that I was not serving my company as well for my pay as someone who was not laid off or fired was serving my company for his or her pay.

So a “layoff” is effectively a firing.

Companies use the “layoff” euphemism to conceal the fact that they are firing employees.

The word “layoff” implies that a company later will “lay on” those laid-off employees — as if the company will start to pay them again after some period. Not!

If you believe, as I do, that a layoff leads to loss but can then lead to liberation, then you have to be optimistic for, and not just “sensitive to”, anyone being laid off.

P.S. If you are now at a company that has laid off other employees but not you, then you might want to review whether your job is still the right fit for you. For this exercise, I recommend a book titled No More Mondays, by Dan Miller.

The provocative subtitle of the book is “Fire Yourself — and Other Revolutionary Ways to Discover Your True Calling at Work”.

Read this book, and you either will renew your career in your current job or will find yourself looking for another job or self-employment.

And you truly will be a “lucky one”, too.

Whole Foods Market’s “buy in bulk” is confusing.

General

If you have ever visited a Whole Foods Market (WFM), then you probably have seen WFM’s shopping row that contains dispensers for all sorts of wonderful nuts, sweets, and other snacks, as well as beans, grains, and cereals.

WFM refers to this aisle as “the bulk section”.

Each dispenser has a pull-down handle that opens a chute at the bottom of the see-through storage bin.

Pull the handle, and the goodies begin to flow — hopefully into a plastic bag that you put beneath the chute ahead of time!

The experience is somewhat like being a kid at a gumball machine but with the power to keep the goodies flowing as long as possible. — Very clever marketing, in my opinion.

I believe that WFM refers to this experience as “buy in bulk”, but there is a problem with this expression.

The applicable definition of the noun “bulk” to this situation is goods not in boxes or packages, typically transported in large volume.

This makes sense because the word “bulk” comes from the Old Norse word bulki, which was coined in the early 1400s to refer to a ship’s hold.

The idiom “in bulk” means in large quantities.

So “buy in bulk” implies that someone is buying a large quantity of loose goods.

But the WFM shopper fully controls the act of dispensing nuts, sweets, or snacks into a plastic bag.

In other words, one can buy as little as a fraction of an ounce of some delectable treat — not exactly what I would call “buying in bulk”!

Perhaps WFM intentionally uses the confusing expression “buy in bulk” because it convinces at least some shoppers that they are getting a bulk discount, but WFM does not charge a discounted rate for larger volumes.

Despite the confusing expression, you cannot beat the experience of walking down an aisle, seeing all sorts of goodies in clear-plastic bins, putting a plastic bag beneath your favorite bin, and holding down the bin’s handle for as long as you want — or until the bag almost overflows or you have run out of money!