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Maybe the phrase 'toxic culture' was imprecise and lazy to begin with. Now people are adapting it in a more precise way. That wiki page was started in 2011 and
by danmg 8y ago
Maybe the phrase 'toxic culture' was imprecise and lazy to begin with. Now people are adapting it in a more precise way.
That wiki page was started in 2011 and it's based on a pop-management book. It's hardly an established term.
- EpicEng 8y ago>It's hardly an established term Yet you said... >You can't prescribe how language is used. Toxic culture now means this. So apparently you can.
- danmg 8y agoFor this author it does mean this. Feel free to use this phrase however you want though.
- ihsw2 8y agoThat's not how language works. Words and terms have meaning, you can't just make stuff up and say "languages evolve/everything is subjective/use whatever phrase you want whenever you want."
- danmg 8y agoWhen it's a phrase with no inherent concrete meaning, yes you can.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> a phrase with no inherent concrete meaning All words and phrases are made up. None of them have an “inherent concrete meaning”. Commonly-accepted deifnitions today may have been entirely foreign a few decades ago.
- kazinator 8y agoWords and phrases can have a de facto inherent meaning when they are in a language shared by the speaker and listener (including a shared knowledge domain). When in spite of this shared language/domain situation, a phrase is gobbledygook, it is fair to say it has "no inherent concrete meaning".
- danmg 8y agoExactly. It's not like the author is saying, "The cat is on the red table."
- danmg 8y agoYes, so the author is free to talk about 'toxic culture' as inflexible management and that makes sense to me.
- mercer 8y agoSo if you think all these things, why do you feel a need to convince us we're wrong? I mean, does your blarf just not embiggen the point yule's trying to make? I mean, depending on what you might think I instoll with a breem like 'your blarf'. I do agree that it all glarps like slofting ar a six year old.
- danmg 8y agook.
- privacypoller 8y agoand then in the same breath state this is "adopting a more precise definition of the term". These comments are like arguing with my six year old.
- NCWV 8y agoWe bow to your superior intellect!
- lmm 8y agoCommunication is a two-way street. A word becomes meaningful when the recipient is able to understand the author through it; if there is no such consensus, then the word can't be said to mean anything.
- ShabbosGoy 8y agoA word is simply a shared reference to a concept. The consensus is around whether or not that reference is valid anymore. Here’s a concrete example: “citizen” meant something completely different 100 years ago. At that time it meant “member of the set of landowners”, which resolved to “white male landowner”. Now the concept of citizen is much different and a lot more contentious.
- EpicEng 8y ago>Now the concept of citizen is much different and a lot more contentious Right, and _both parties agree to the current definition_. That's the entire point.
- lmm 8y ago"citizen" is meaningful because people do have a shared understanding of its meaning - people who are arguing about who is and isn't a citizen are still agreeing about what a citizen is. This article doesn't seem to be claiming that the culture at Intel has the aspects that people normally refer to when they say "toxic culture", it's trying to express something different - there's no factual disagreement, only a semantic one, which means the word has failed to convey meaning.