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EpicEng

>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.

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For this author it does mean this. Feel free to use this phrase however you want though.

That'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."

When it's a phrase with no inherent concrete meaning, yes you can.

> 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.

Words 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".

Exactly. It's not like the author is saying, "The cat is on the red table."

Yes, so the author is free to talk about 'toxic culture' as inflexible management and that makes sense to me.

So 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.

ok.

and 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.

Communication 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.

A 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.

>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.

"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.

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