I Believe . . . This Makes NO Sense

[Doug_Harris]

Whatever happened to the world where "the business of business is
business" -- NOT (business being) an environment where perfectly
sensible words and phrases are displaced, for no real reason, by
totally nonsensical words or phrases.
They _mean_ 'neutral'. They should simply _say_ 'neutral'.
--
That said, I appreciate your feedback on this Ben. (And an appropriate
plus it _was_, too!)
dh


On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 5:04 PM, Doug_Harris <cats22 at stny.rr.com> wrote:
>
> -agnostic -- as in product-agnostic, database-agnostic, vendor-agnostic.
> domain-agnostic, and so on.
> There seem to be, all of a sudden, an unbelievable, or un-provable, number
> of variations on that sense-defying coinage.
> Do you suppose 'they' mean, say, product-neutral, as in something that
> applies to all products (within a range), or vendor-neutral, as in
something
> that would be applicable to or good for all vendors?
> I first encountered it in a training course for where the context was that
> the company aims to "ensure all call-back script is product-agnostic to
> avoid any future [confusion]".
> Never mind the future: I was confused today!

As it happens (shameless plug alert), Nancy Friedman's latest column for the
Visual Thesaurus is all about the appropriation of religious terms in the
business world:

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/candlepwr/1601/

The full article is only available to subscribers (rates are quite
reasonable!), but Nancy helpfully excerpts the section on "agnostic" on her
own blog:

---
http://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/2008/11/faithbased-business
.html
Agnostic: In religious parlance, agnostic -- literally "without knowledge"
-- refers to a person who has doubts about a deity or religious tenets. (The
term was coined in 1869 by the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley.) In
business, and especially in technology, agnostic is a suffix attached to
words such as platform, marketing, and media. In those contexts it simply
means "neutral" -- a platform-agnostic program can run on PCs, Macs, and
Linux machines; a media-agnostic publication is created for multiple
channels (print, online, broadcast, etc.).
---


--Ben Zimmer

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org