It's amazing to me how new idioms can appear suddenly.Maybe it's just the way that buzzword memes propagate, and that some epidemiological model could explain why something you've never heard before suddenly appears multiple times in the same day.
Or maybe it's a matter of awareness: perhaps one suddenly becomes cognizant of something that was always around them, and it only seems to be new.
Today's example is the use of the word "onboard" as a verb. I don't think I've ever heard it before, but I heard it in two completely separate contexts today.
The first context was in a small meeting where a manager was talking about efforts to hire new employees to replace some that have moved on to other places. He referred to it as "onboarding them".
The second context was a situation that I would have thought to be somewhat culturally separated: a representative from a software vendor eager for us to buy their product. This time the phrase was something like "once they've been onboarded", again in reference to new employees -- ableit hypothetical employees this time.
Well, I guess they were hypothetical in both cases.
Anyway, this happened to me at a time when I'm in the heat of transition: preparing to onboard one company after overboarding another.
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I'm not onboarding that bandwagon.
Today I heard "deliverables" for the first time (and then several times) in a multi-party telephone conference. The term was used to reference documents certain parties were supposed to prepare and provide to the other parties. Another useless $5 word.
hey, you got those tps reports ready yet?
i don't know, deliverables is kinda useful b/c it can be used to reference all kinds of things different people are supposed to supply in order for an effort to meet some type of objective.
Yeah, it's funny. Some things don't bother me, because I recognize how jargon can make communication more efficient. I learned this at a young age while watching surgeries happen on TV shows. Speed and accuracy was clearly important in that context. No time to fumble for words.
Deliverables counts, for me. If you have a meeting where lots of different people need to provide lots of different kinds of things, and you want to refer to them all at once, then that single word is a useful generalization.
Plus as a programmer I'm in the habit of adding "-able" to the end of verbs as a naming convention for abstractions in my code that happen to be interfaces. Maybe that makes it easier for me to swallow.
I think it did grate on my ears when I first heard it, though.
But "onboarding" is just plain silly when there are words like "joining" or "hiring".
These two contexts are not without intersection. What they have in common is that both sources are part of bureaucracy run amok. There are probably graduate students in linguistics who have studied this in some detail, but if not it's yet another thesis topic. (I come up with these all the time.) I suspect that the primary driver is the perceived need to euphemize in such organizations. "Help Desk" and "Pilot Project" became phrases not to be uttered in a bureacratic organization I once knew. The 'crats just came up with different names for these things when they needed to do things that were not permitted. "Onborarding" clearly is an attemp to avoid the term "hire", which would imply increasing a "head count", which is always a sensitive subject in budget driven organizations.
Oh, and, uh... don't forget the new cover sheet on the TPS reports. We're all supposed to use the new cover on the TPS reports. Did you get the memo? I'll print you a copy of the memo.
It just occurred to me that maybe 'onboarding' is a useful generalization to encompass people who are not only new hires but also contractors or new interns.
Hmmm. Maybe I'm being body snatched by pointy-haired pod people.
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