Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

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9. And/or An editor once told me, "And-slash-or means 'and' or 'or,' so pick one, unless you have no idea what you're trying to say, in which case, by all means use it."

I think that to some people this could seem misleading and/or incorrect.

8. People manager As opposed to "Goldfish supervisor?" Seriously, this is a "try not to offend anyone term," that makes managers of people and non-people (whatever that is) feel less like managers or people and more like guppies.

"Manager" is a very wide term. You can manage processes, you can manage inventories, you can manage people, you can manage documents. Is a document manager a people manager? No.

5. Take Away You take away food in a paper bag with a clown on it. Period.

Sometimes "What's the take-away from this?" can be a good quick synonym for "What are the important conclusions and insights we should get from this?" You might dislike it, but it's hardly ban-worthy.

Certainly, some of the examples there are pretty annoying, but I don't get the whole "words to ban" thing... seems like a pretty weak article for a publication by a prestigious university.

Well in normal English, 'or' is generally exclusive. The cat is black or red. (Generally understood that he is one or the other, not both.)

So, to me, 'and/or' is the English equivalent of the inclusive OR. The cat is black and/or red. (The cat may be black or red or both.)

Pretty sure this was discussed here a while back. (English boolean operators versus the programming kind.)

  English     Logic
  and         AND
  or          XOR
  and/or      OR

So yeah, I'd agree with you in that I think the author's banning of 'and/or' is wrong. Honestly the only ones that I agreed with were 6, 7, 8, and 10. I've never even heard people use several of the others.

One thing I hate is my current employer's culture of referring to people as 'resources'. I am not a lump of coal or a gallon of oil thank you very much. It took me quite a while to figure out that 'allocating resources' was a euphemism for 'reorganizing', which is itself a euphemism for 'firing some dead weight'.

Meh, I disagree. I think prestigious universities have a reason to criticize sloppy/cliched/just plain annoying language. Did you not read Brave New World? The words we use are the thoughts we think.

I might agree with you though, on "take away." I find it annoying but it is less rude than the more straightforward, "What is your point?"

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