Nouns

“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.

“…, and etcetera.”

Common English Blunders, Nouns, Redundancies

I heard this during a telephone call yesterday.

Problem:
The phrase is redundant.

Explanation:
The noun “etcetera” — abbreviated as “etc.” — means and other unspecified things of the same type or class.

So “and etcetera” literally means and and other unspecified things of the same type or class.

For fun, I searched Google for “and etcetera” (including the quotation marks) and found about 67,200 matches.

Suspecting that this was only part of the story, I then searched Google for “and etc.” (including the quotation marks) and found about 9,280,000 matches.

Combining the matches for the abbreviated and unabbreviated forms, that’s over 9.3 million matches for this redundant phrase!

Solution:
“…, etcetera.”