[bmhin]

> Maybe it bothers me that using ask as a noun is passive voice, like the request is disembodied. I'm not asking, the ask just appeared there!

I think the latter is the key to corpspeak as a whole and it has ramifications beyond just stripped emotion. It always erases causality from the communication. Everything is just "appearing" with no thought to how or why things are the way they are. Businesses are really, really bad about asking "Why?" at times and this kind of language reinforces that. There is no "Why?", things just materialize into existence and are and you (have to) deal with them.

The emotion part makes sense, because often the answer to a "Why?" is because someone has made a mistake or done something dumb and it provides cover. However, it also leads to rote, wasteful, inefficient behaviors. It doesn't necessitate that there is no reason "why" things are being done, but it does mean that a reason isn't required either.

"Why are we having this sync meeting?" "Well, to sync of course!"

[cfcf14]

Completely agree! It's not even clear who is asking. Causality is erased, as you say.

"I have an ask for you" - is it my ask? Am I conveying somebody else's ask? Who knows? It's atemporal, acausal, you can choose to investigate by querying but there's a good chance the response is going to be a shrug and a small, apologetic smile accompanied by "ah - you know, the usual" at which point you'll sigh and respond with "yep - ok, let me see if I have the bandwidth and circle back to you on that".

[mpalczewski]

You could just substitute "ask" with "request", and it's less corp speak but has all the same connotations. It looks more like tribal signaling.