Reply to post: I exploit my vocabulary. It is a slave to my whims.

I exploit my vocabulary. It is a slave to my whims.

I read an excellent blog post about the word, "exploit", a few years ago. The thrust of the argument was this: nonsense words like "leverage" (which should only be a noun and never a verb) only serve to weaken communication when they are used in place of perfectly adequate and, in fact, ideal words that have long existed in the English language. If one wants to make an unequivocal point, one should use real words. Strong words are not offensive if used appropriately.

Ever since then, I have made a point of exploiting the word, "exploit", whenever possible. The same goes for many other words. "Implementing this feature should be easy, now, because we can exploit the additional ground-work that we included in sprint (n-2)," I might announce in a planning meeting. "No, the hardware devices should always be slaves to the software service running on box Y," I will continue to declare in the future.

Living in Germany, this is expected. Professionals communicate conclusively. There is no strange personification of software systems and hardware tools -- a fact that is astounding given that my testers often report things like, "He tells me that he cannot connect to the remote server," because of the fact that German nouns have genders.

I will continue to use the English language as she was meant to be spoke. If I have to continue to live in Germany in order to get away with that, I won't complain. I will leverage my proximity to some of the oldest and best breweries in the world and be perfectly content.

I, a master of my mother-tongue, shall never surrender!