The Ask

Corporate culture loves semantic shifts, especially when it involves turning nouns into verbs (tasking, mainstreaming, ideate). I've recently noticed a new noun-to-verb creation, one where the speaker treats ask like a noun, as if I can pose an ask or request an ask, or, absurdly, ask what is their ask. This is stupid. We have a perfectly comfortable word that already performs the action in noun form: question. Turning ask into a noun not only confuses anyone used to its standard verb function, but also creates a redundancy, even if ask is a shorter word than question.

A good synonym should perform a similar function, not an equal function. School courses taught some of us to treat synonyms as equals. Swap a common word for an equally uncommon word and you pass that SAT essay. But even words like glad and happy, which may have the same definition, imply different meanings. Happy conveys bright smiles and an extroverted cheerfulness, while glad speaks more softly—people may not smile wildly or walk with a sprightly gait, but, if asked, would confirm they are in a positive mood. Bad synonyms, like ask, add nothing new to our language. Allowing such words to infiltrate common speech and writing creates not only redundancies but also allows for habits that devolve language into a mess of nonsense.

Language should remain clean and forceful. Inventing new definitions for well-grounded words does not help maintain stylistic strength. It may be interesting as a linguist, but not to a common speaker and writer. Confusing the definitions of words detracts from the cleanliness and forcefulness as it makes the reader learn known words in unknown contexts. Language should not stop evolving, but it should evolve in refreshing, inventive, and novel ways. If a new word explains quickly something we could not before easily explain, then it's fair game for adoption. Recent technology lends a perfect example: blog, smartphone, and app all serve an exact function that before was not fulfilled by our language (online public diary page, handheld computer telephone, piece of software you can run). Language must evolve, but it doesn't need to evolve into redundancies and confusion.

Which brings me back to the nonsense of corporate English. Ask is a verb and question is a noun (and verb). Keep it that way.