Avoid weasel words
According to Wikipedia, In Japan, weasels (鼬、鼬鼠, itachi) were seen as yōkai (causing strange occurrences). The innocent weasel does not get much of a break, culture after culture. The term ‘weasel words’ seem to have originated from William Shakespeare’s Henry V where the bard presents similes of weasels sucking eggs. In a manner it cannot because apparently weasels lack the jaw muscilature to live up to ‘the weasel Scot comes sneaking, and so sucks her princely eggs’.
I can tell you what weasel words cause in companies: a get out jail free card for the presenter.
Here is a list of words that should be banned from documents, presentations and speech in the workplace IMO:
- Hopefully, “I Hope” and its cousin ‘I think”
- Maybe
- Probably
- Possibly
- “That being said”
- “Could be”
- “takes too long”
- “very easy experience” ,”convenient”
Take a word like ‘hopefully’. A common usage would be a phrase like
‘We have worked on a plan where hopefully by the end of Q1, we will have completed the task.
What a way to avoid commiting to any outcome. If you get it done, you can point to it and say ‘see, I told you’. But if you fail, you have an escape clause: after all, you never committed to an outcome, you said it is best effort. Yoda was right
“Do or don’t do — there is no try”
Have a backbone. Make an assertive statement. Trust yourself that you will find a way to deliver. The moment you give your self a free pass, you will lack the commitment to get to the outcome. Instead of ‘hopefully’ say
‘We have worked on a plan where we will complete the task by the end of Q1.
A related text that is common in product and design docs are “easy to use”.
“We are building a new UI that will be easy to use for customers”
What does that mean? nothing. Because there is no yardstick to measure ease of use. So you can build anything at all and it will meet the criterea. (see also: Input and output metrics) Instead, say the following
“We are building a new UI which will load in under 2 seconds as measured by RUM and the user will be able to complete the purchase task in under 5 seconds”
There will never be any doubt about whether the new UI met goals or not.
