alt Hacker NewsPrivilege is bad grammar
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It’s because the higher you are in the chain of corporate command, the less time you have to dedicate to each task. You end up with shorter answers to every note because you wouldn’t have time to reply to all notes and do the strategic things you need to do, otherwise.
As an individual contributor on a team, you may have to interface at most with 30 people on a weekly basis. As a second line leader you may have 150 people under your purview, and another 50 outsiders you have to talk to. You can’t scale the amount of time you have, so you scale the amount of time you spend on replies.
What is sad is that these people from the start think of good grammar as an effort to "look professional" (which they can then discard), and not as an effort to be clear, an effort which fits into the basic respect one gives other people.
Bad grammar is disrespect. Underlings have to swallow that disrespect. It is just a power game. The next level is simply to insult everyone, and everyone will still remain submissive.
Informality and bad grammar but otherwise sound decision making is fine, I think everyone's arguments for it here make sense.
But let's not pretend that, at least in the US, that's what it's limited to. Our current and immediate past president are both elderly men with potentially compromised mental states who regularly say crazy nonsense stuff.
Try watching this (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=455169079910588) or this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZsdlULgqvA) and then watch the literal crowds of people who are saying "you just don't understand! You're not parsing it right! You're not paying enough attention to their genius!"
It's wild that we make excuses like this for people. One has to ask where the line is.
This almost certainly happens in business, too - it's just not as obvious because those folks don't have to constantly do it in public.
What I've seen is that leaders often communicate brusquely downward, but formally upward - and the higher the rank, the greater the magnitude (in each direction).
I think it's a consequence of having more and more people asking you things (on the downward side), while being responsible for decisions of more critical importance (on the upward side) as you go further up the chain of command.
I point you to Nancy Mitford's piece (and others) on U vs non-U.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
This was a, tongue in cheek, distinction between the language used by the posh and by the aspiring-posh. It's seems analogous to the OP's sense of boss vs non-boss language and diction, which I believe exists.
That fits witj my experiences. And i want to add an otjer layer. In ai times its somtimes even nice to see some typos. You Casn be pretty sure it was not written by ai.
I think this isn't quite what "privilege" means, at least these days. People talk about "white privilege" for example, meaning that people who are white can do XYZ or avoid ABC, unlike other people.
In the example the author writes about, the privilege is not "being a bag grammar person", it's being a high-ranking person. The bad grammar is the thing that those people are able to get away with.
IMO, he's confusing the disease with the symptom, so to speak.
Separately, I would say that high-ranking people can definitely get away with short emails, and to some extent brusque emails. Bad grammar is perhaps just the next domino to topple.
> but grammar privilege? That's certainly a first.
Here is what I don't understand, and what is not addressed in the post.
After you get a response from your boss that reads, "K let circle back nxt week bout it . thnks", doesn't this free you up to relax your style to your comfort level? If you see that your addressee doesn't seem to care for meticulous style, is there much point in stressing over it (and thus, in continuing with the privilege narrative)?
I don't think the author realizes the time*attention triage that happens when your sole corporate responsibility is to manage others. I've noticed a distinct personal trend in "email succinctness" the more people I need to manage.
That said, using good grammar is never a bad thing and depending on the subject matter and relationships between the respective communicators, short-hand can be both a deliberate obfuscation practice and social coding of the intimacy of the respective relationships.
At one of my previous jobs some of my coworkers and I had an in-joke about how it was possible to tell which of the emails from the CEO were written directly by him or not based on whether it used the spelling "pls" for "please" because of how often he liked to use it. It hadn't occurred to me to view this phenomenon in the way that the article does, but at least in my experience it certainly seems to be accurate.
if i sent an email to my ceo and they replied with typos and bad grammar, i wouldn't think "wow, they are flexing their privilege to be able to do that".
i would be excited that i'm being treated as a member of the inner circle and they can speak freely and casually with me.
I don't know where this guy has worked, but I've never worked for anyone who communicates like an ignorant, lazy ass.
Also, while I find his criticism valid for having had indeed seen it, this is ironic: "how sloppy and unprofessional emails from executives looked like."
I'd put it the other way around: Bad Grammar is a courtesy. I run a startup that's small, but busy. I get a high frequency stream of inbound questions, notifications and asks to make decisions by my team and customers. If I don't respond or decide quickly I become a bottleneck. Likewise, if I wait, things pile up. So, rather than keep everyone waiting for me, I make a point of pulling my phone out as soon as I get a message and provide an answer straight away as much as possible. These answers are brief and to the point. And they are laden with shitty grammar. But they are almost instant and that feels better than a well formulated essay two hours later.
Having said that, I started using Gmail's "polish" feature to turn "yes" into "That sounds great, let's go ahead with it" or some such corporatism. Not sure if that's much better...
This is so yawn. Do young professionals starting out have to impress their bosses? Yes. Do bosses have to impress them? Usually not. Who cares? Power dynamics exist, it’s easy to play the grammar game, so just do it and stop pretending it’s some form of oppression.
ppl are so sensitive. it's not impolite to be direct. why would you be wasting each other's time by "dear, sincerely etc" every single time.
> If I had sent out an email with even a quarter of the typos they had, I probably would've lost my job.
This probably isn’t true, though. But you didn’t want to test your luck, so you took the safe route of carefully crafting your emails. The privilege is not worrying about being fired over trivial reasons.
I am more appalled that all those emails have that footer that says - if you’re not intended recipient you should delete immediately. Yet people see it and just copy those emails. No respect for the legal disclaimer. Now they can all be sued for ignoring that legal disclaimer, I suppose they will face justice sooner than all those people in emails.
I had a boss once who had "this is sent from my phone, please excuse any spelling or grammar" as his email signature
K much to thin bout . thnks
Sent from my iPhone
In the country where I grew up, physicians have immense clout and are notorious for writing unintelligibly. I once pointed this out as a kid and was told by the secretary something like: the doctor is too busy to write legible prescriptions.
This is why I like to have business with Germans and Japanese, their emails are the best.
> It's almost as if, once you get to a certain level of power, you no longer need to try.
Correct. I think it's also a bit of a shibboleth now, like not wearing a suit. In former days the lower ranked employees wore jeans, t-shirts, hoodies, etc. and the bosses all wore suits and ties. Now it's the opposite at least in tech. If you see someone in "business" attire, you know they're middle management or sales and have no power, where if someone is in a tshirt and jeans they're probably a founder or executive. It's a flex to dress casual.
Grammar privilege feels 90% understanding the audience and timing vs something like 10% power dynamics. As with most things where there can be a power imbalance, that does not mean those with power (e.g. managers) should not help set expectations on an even field with each of their employees anyways. Nor does it mean the other 10% of cases don't exist, just "don't ignore that 90% of this is probably one being too worried about sounding professional in every possible scenario".
Before going into the workforce, we're usually taught professionals are expected to communicate like professionals 100% of the time. It's just the safer bet to make as it's simply a lot harder (though certainly not impossible) to foul things up in a professional situation by having good grammar and well written emails than vice versa.
That said, it seems like most people I've ever actually worked with (on any level) do not like communicating 100% professionally the majority of the time (especially in small groups/directly) and may actually consider THAT disrespectful. Some from practicality ("don't waste so much time on an email we could have talked through casually in a minute" etc), some for just having different social expectations ("We've worked together for 3 years, why are you sounding like a door-to-door salesman about to make a pitch to me instead of just saying you had a thought" etc), or a laundry list of other reasons. Telling when and how much professionalism is expected is just something you have to learn to read the individual/crowd for, but it's probably a positive signal a lot less often than the author assumes it usually is.
Definitely my experience as well.
Another dimension to this is native vs 2nd language speakers.
For those of us who had to learn English, we put a lot of effort into grammar, while native speakers whip out half-baked sentences without a second thought.
> If I had sent out an email with even a quarter of the typos they had, I probably would've lost my job.
Who told you that?
Or maybe... what state do you work in? I cannot even imagine starting the HR process to fire someone because of bad emails.
From the article:
> It's almost as if, once you get to a certain level of power, you no longer need to try.
It’s relative to the power level difference between the two parties.
We’re talking about someone (your boss) who doesn’t really need to present an appearance of professionalism to their proverbial lowly underlings.
As slapdash as their response to you might appear - if you were to observe that same person composing a reply to the CEO, I'd wager that all the hallmarks of grammatical precision and professionalism would be back in spades.
Isn’t this more about the specific generation these people represent instead of their privilege?
I used to be super keen about grammar and typos in texts as well, recently, I have been intentionally keeping some mistakes to prove that a human actually wrote that text and wasn’t AI generated, from my personal observation, I found that people now assume any perfectly written text is an AI generated and ended up not reading it all.
Using language "correctly" is one of humanity's oldest class dividers. [citation needed, source: me speculating] If you personally benefit from dividing people into in- and out-groups (most of the time you do), saying you must speak a certain way is a great way to get people to self-identify on one side of that line. (Excluding cases where grammar helps with communication, that's "I don't understand you" versus "you sound poor".)
You make it hard enough that someone needs years of expensive education or has to be born in the right family that speaks the right way, and now all we can do it try to meet that arbitrary standard. Everyone will struggle, so the act of calling it out is a choice, rather than a fact. If someone lets that mask slip, IMO it's because they're not worried about being accused of occupying the wrong side of the line, rather than any lack of "trying". Trying sort of implies there is a goal to hit.
At first i was about to disagree, because i thought, "ah hell nah man I'm sending emojis and shit at work all day" and then i realized, i send emojis and shit to my peers all day (well, and to my dumbass boss who i don't respect).
I think about the email i sent that was to be read by the CTO and i not only ensured it was totally correct, i asked a colleague to proofread it.
Maybe someone can clarify this but I was also pretty appalled by the grammar in the Epstein emails until someone pointed out it could be an artifact of OCR or decoding issues.
Not sure why they would have to do OCR on emails. Were they printed out? On PDF for some reason? The decoding thing I kinda get but that you can easily point out because of all the equal signs.
There's no high culture anymore. Rich people don't go to operas or read poetry or literature. They drink too much and they can't spell. They're just plebs with money.
Hobbes says that talking to someone with courtesy is honor(giving them relative power), and talking trashy is dishonor(reducing their relative power).
Its not very long, but I use this in my daily life:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3207/pg3207-images.html...
I also use the 12 bullet points before that on Power.
I think its probably just having to respond to lots of messages from your phone in the middle of meetings is the job, and you'll quickly decide that getting the point across is the most important thing.
It's funny she mentions the horrible grammar in the leaked sony emails because that's what I remember most from it too. This one always gets a laugh from me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/marvelstudios/comments/33tkv6/actua...
In the United states, at least in my business, we prize congeniality and sincerity. I think part of the trend the author discovered might be that experienced professionals unconsciously use informal language structures to avoid seeming pretentious.
Never thought of it that way, very interesting insight. I always thought those "K circle back" emails were fake but nope looks like they're very real.
Man, everything is privilege these days. You’re privileged to get full score on SAT, Steph Curry has 3 point privilege, Taylor Swift has singer privilege. I have nice warm blanket privilege and am currently experiencing President’s Day privilege. I remember when I had just started in engineering and experiencing new grad privilege and then receiving promotion privilege every year.
I’ve been thinking about going and getting grocery privilege today but I could use delivery privilege instead.
This is almost textbook countersignalling. The same as:
- Signalling: I dress more formally than everyone else to make up for the fact I'm less professional in other ways
- No signalling: I dress like everyone else because I am like everyone else
- Countersignalling: I wear ratty old clothes with holes in them, and nobody will dare to question it because I'm the important one here