Think Before You Speak

John Sullivan is a working project manager who writes and speaks on project and career issues.

 

Over the years I have heard formal words that have been given a new meaning ("leverage") or mean something different than implied ("workaround"). There is no name for this phenomenon. The closest term is "slang," defined as "language peculiar to a group"(The American Heritage Dictionary) and by Mary Ellen Guffey in Essentials of Business Communication as "composed of informal words with arbitrary and extravagantly changed meanings." While no term exists to define formal words with changed meanings, the process is not a surprise to linguists.

"English is a living language," says Betty Youngkin, Associate Professor of English at the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio . "When a language is living, the people who speak and write it are creative with it. Because English speakers and writers like to experiment with this living language, they create words and phrases and expressions that have not been tried before."

One created word is "workaround." It does not exist in any dictionary I consulted and would seem to mean "a temporary way to do something," but…

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