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I'm more forgiving about corporate jargon than most. A lot of it really does help optimize communication for the situations you encounter in corporate work. Bu
by gipp 5y ago
I'm more forgiving about corporate jargon than most. A lot of it really does help optimize communication for the situations you encounter in corporate work.
But "learnings" is literally, exactly, just a synonym for "lessons." Can we not?
- bloak 5y agoAlso the "sharing". Is the article about "sharing"? Perhaps a normal human would have used the title "An evaluation of our image cropping algorithm".
- dylan604 5y agoMaybe there's a bias to sharing since it is a social media platform where sharing is the thing?
- alanbernstein 5y agoI disagree, "Sharing lessons..." would mean "here is an educational resource that we have created, as teachers, for an audience of students". I think "Lessons learned..." is closer to what you mean to suggest, and "Learnings..." is more concise (this is from Twitter, after all).
- robotresearcher 5y agoGoogle 'lessons from' and you'll see that one usage is synonymous with 'learnings from'. The suggested completions are perfectly idiomatic.
- kzrdude 5y ago"Can we not?" is a pretty modern colloquialism. Is it better or worse than learnings?
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoIt's a neologism, or possibly the resurrection of a long unused form - I don't know exactly how we came about it but I agree completely that one of the meanings of "lesson" is "a thing which has been learned". In my experience, there's a tendency toward folksiness in certain varieties of corpspeak that causes rejection of "formal-sounding" terms and repurposing of "plainer" forms to create new words, hence lessons = learnings, protégé = mentee, and so on.
- jameshart 5y agoI don't know why people object to the word 'learnings'. Do you also dislike the word 'teachings'?
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoI don't think the fact that some words can be formed that way is a good guide to whether other formations are words or not. Do you think "cookings" is a word? It would be "things that have been cooked" I suppose, on that basis. I would say if it's a word it's one I've never heard before. On the other hand, "cuttings" is clearly a word in common usage in horticulture.
- jameshart 5y agoMy point is more that it sits in roughly the same semantic space as ‘lessons’ and ‘learnings’, yet there seems to be room for nuanced differences of meaning. Yet I don’t see people object to ‘teachings’ on the basis that we already have the word ‘lessons’.
- munificent 5y ago> I don't know why people object to the word 'learnings'. It bugs me because it emerged out of tech executive culture and caught on in large part because others used it as an aspirational signal to sound like they are members of that group.
- blackshaw 5y agoI don't really care, but since you asked: "learnings" grates my ears because it sounds wrong. I never used to hear people say it, and as GP points out, we already had the perfectly good word "lessons". "Learnings" to me sounds like a mistake a non-native English speaker would make, perhaps by incorrectly extrapolating from the word "teachings". It's a forgivable mistake, but I don't see why we need to adopt it into the native vernacular. (Yeah, yeah, I know, language evolves, prescriptive versus descriptive etc.. In a world where "literally" no longer means literally, I'm not going to waste much time getting angry about "learnings".)