[retrocryptid]

I like that someone said this, but I really Grit my teeth when someone says "learnings."

I have no problem with using preferred pronouns or saying "chestfeeding" instead of "breastfeeding." I don't understand it, but if it's making you uncomfortable, I'm totally fine with changing that part of my vocabulary.

But "ask" and "learn" are verbs. You "ask questions" or "make requests" and you "learn lessons." You do not "have asks," you "have questions." And you sure as daisies don't "learn learnings."

It's sad that this is what I'm taking away from this discussion, but it's Saturday night and I'm posting a comment on HN instead of dating a hot European super-model, so I'm sort of used to sad.

[pfannkuchen]

I think the problem with “lesson” is that it sounds like you started out in the wrong. An important part of corpspeak is never directly accusing anyone of being wrong or directly admitting having been wrong yourself. Acquiring learnings does not have this connotation (possibly because it is a nonsense word).

[mnsc]

Thank you for making me realize what I don't like about "lessons learnt". I don't care about corpspeak but when you are an agile team involved in continous learning it's very important to be able to tell someone that they are in the wrong. They might have put in two weeks of hard work devolving a poc in a area the team know little about only to present it wider and get the feedback that this won't work because of x, u and z. Then you haven't "learned your lessons" because we don't yet have the right answer. BUT we got some very good learnings from this failed work that we need to remember/use in the next attempt.

[retrocryptid]

You would think we would have a word that better expresses something like: "you did some quality work, but it was insufficient to relieve us of our collective ignorance."

And in a way that your manager won't say something like "but this violates our corporate principal: 'be right, often.'"

Maybe there's a word for this in German. They have a number of words for seemingly specific situations. And I'm not above Introducing a few more foreign words to our corporate lexicon. We're already using Fingerspitzengefühl, Schwerpunkt and Feierabend.

[retrocryptid]

That sounds legit. The last thing we want in corp-speak is to establish culpability. "Experiences" might work instead, but it sounds very Californian.

[DiscourseFan]

You think you're a pedant, but you haven't yet encountered someone with such a thorough knowledge of Indo-European grammar that could tell you that not only is nominalizing participles common in our family of languages, it is so common you see it in practically every language in the family and it doesn't violate any rules of grammar. "beating" is a present participle, like "learning." It would be fine to say, "the beatings of the man," but you may be confused about whether it is a subjective or objective genitive--is it the man who is being beaten, or the man doing the beatings. Likewise, I think what makes you uncomfortable about the term "learnings" is not whether it conforms to any grammatical or syntactic rules, but that it is rather ambiguous--it can be taken as transitive or intransitive. You "learn" something, but you also learn by being taught by someone. To say, then, the "learnings of the man," could refer both to his education, and to his teachings (and you see there, "teachings," is no different from "learnings" grammatically, except that "to teach" is definitively transative).

>And you sure as daisies don't "learn learnings."

You might be shocked to learn that such expressions are extraordinarily common in say ancient Greek (which uses participles in a very similar way to English--they are related after all!) People "look a looking," an expression used to mean someone holds a particular countenance. If someone can teach teachings, why can't someone learn learnings? I don't think there is anything wrong with using intransative verbs in this way.

[retrocryptid]

Sure, ask the person who understands indo-european languages to join us.

[mnsc]

You don't "learn learnings" I agree but in my mind you _get_ learnings from the process of learning stuff. The same way you get findings from the process of finding stuff out. I'm a Swedish speaker and we have a dedicated word "lärdom" that we use like "learning" so that usage is very natural to me. "lessons learnt" is clunky to me and there we have another saying, "lära sig en läxa" that has the school connotations.

[dclowd9901]

Passive voice writing often grits in the teeth. Just like that.

Most writings that feel fresh or novel have an active voice that asserts something. In journalism, you’re taught to write in an active voice. If you can’t assert someone did something, then you shouldn’t be saying anything at all.

In any case, I think this is why I like noir writing so much. It doesn’t fiddle faddle with getting something across. It either happens or it doesn’t.

[currio]

Thanks! s/learnings/lessons learnt/

[germinalphrase]

Making a noun from a verb is called nominalization. Old school writing guides would advise writers to generally avoid it.