Microspeak: "Offline"
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I've identified a microspeak word in the office. Around here, the word "offline" actually means "outside of the conference call" or "after the conference call" or "with fewer people than we currently have on the conference call." It's used incessantly during our weekly engineering status meetings. Some examples:
That's not an issue for the full group so let's meet offline to discuss it further.
I'll offline you an email with further details.
actually means the person will send an email after the conference call ends.
I need to meet with you three offline about [insert issue/project/feature here].
means he actually wants to schedule another meeting but with a smaller group of people than the current meeting.
Note that while we're a small company, we have two offices several states apart and have salesmen who work from home all across the country, so more often than not any "offline discussions" involve phone calls, Skype, email, and/or instant messaging!
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I'll offline you an email with further details.
what the what.
that is one of the dumbest phrases I've ever seen.
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Wait, that's not standard business speak? That's used all the time here. "Offline" has no relation to "Online", it means "outside the current context, in private, so we can stop derailing this context".
Yeah, that's pretty universal:
Filed under: oneboxing is arbitrary
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Wait, that's not standard business speak?
I think it is. @mott555 is borrowing a page from Raymond Chen, where Microspeak is a term used at MS. Many of these are also used everywhere else, too. We use offline all the time, though I agree with @darkmatter that:
I'll offline you an email with further details.
...is very stupid, and I've never heard that one before.
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We use "offline" to mean in person.
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There's gotta be some catchy law of English that all nouns eventually transitive-verb themselves.
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We're a pretty distributed team, so it's generally just meant to mean outside the context of the particular conference call or meeting so as to not inconvenience the rest of the group with things irrelevant to them.
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We use "in private" or "aside" or some other derivative to mean "outside of the full group".
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We commonly use 'offline' to mean 'not in the current setting', or 'in a smaller setting than the current meeting'. It'll frequently involve email, the bug tracker, or the issue tracker.
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Sounds like it's a bit more pervasive than I realize, but I'd never heard it before until this company. While it's mostly amusing it's also annoying. Words have definitions for a reason.
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I don't think it's intrinsic to the language; I think it's more that verbal precision is Doing It Wrong™.
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Verbal precision is so 20th-century!
Filed under: didn't you get the memo?
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I hate all of you, @blakeyrat style.
Or in the case of these crappy uses of the english language,
I @blakeyrat all of you.
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We use "offline" to mean in person.
My colleagues and I use cyberspace and meatspace to differentiate this. Fortunately, my colleagues have a sense of humour.
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We use "offline" to mean in person.
I'll in-person you an email with further details
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exactly, that sentence is every bit as retarded and meaningless as it looks.
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There's gotta be some catchy law of English that all nouns eventually transitive-verb themselves.
I'm all for verbing nouns and nouning verbs, but only when it makes sense
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I idea your reject. I will offline you about it later.
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Sounds like it's a bit more pervasive than I realize, but I'd never heard it before until this company. While it's mostly amusing it's also annoying. Words have definitions for a reason.
Definitions like "Situated or carried on away from a railway, or the main line of a railway" [OED]?Yeah, I agree. I don't know what kind of jargon-happy person started using "offline" to mean "while not on a computer [network]".
(Incidentally, by looking at the various definitions one can surmise how the "outside of the conference call" usage developed. It started off with the railway meaning, and then was adopted for a similar meaning in airlines. Then it made the critical jump: by the 60s, it was used for "Esp. in manufacturing: separate from or subsidiary to the main sequence of operations of a process; not performed on or forming part of a production line." And that meaning is pretty close to the sense is which it's used here -- "we'll take that question offline" (a common phrase during conferences) means "I'll answer that question outside of the main Q&A session." The OED's earliest citations for the railroad definition and that definition are 1919 and 1963 resp., meaning "offline" has been used that way for more than half of the word's life.)
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For most people, saying things is just a way to make you think something, just like typing code is just a way to make a computer behave the way you want it to.
Poor communicators are just like poor programmers - they simply keep saying sort-of relevant things until you get it. Probably with a lot of mental copy-paste from other conversations that seemed to have been successful.
Good communicators understand the nuances of words and phrases in order to get thoughts into others people's heads more efficiently.
Most importantly, the overwhelming majority of people don't care about the act of communication and simply adopt a "if it works it's good enough" attitude.
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I'll offline you a video chat and maybe we can offline some pizza later.
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does that mean at some point I am going to erection you, myself and everyone else around me?
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Most importantly, the overwhelming majority of people don't care about the act of communication and simply adopt a "if it works it's good enough" attitude.
QFT.
Even more aggravating: what satisfies the criterion "it works" isn't quite in the same ballbark for that majority as it is for people who tend to choose their words thoughtfully.