"Exonerative tense," "mistakes were made," etc.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/past_exonerative

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_were_made

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/07/14/...

Favorite example has to be Luis Suarez in his apology for very clearly biting a World Cup opponent in front of the world some years ago:

"The truth is that my colleague Giorgio Chiellini suffered the physical result of a bite"

Some newspapers are really dreadful about this with regards to people killed/injured by cops.

A well-known example from the NYT:

> A reporter was hit by a pepper ball on live television by an officer who appeared to be aiming at her

https://www.poynter.org/ethics-trust/2020/new-york-times-twe...

Newspapers also need to be careful to not spout facts about a potential crime that doesn’t have a guilty verdict. They’d have to throw an allegedly or something in there to write it as you described which I don’t know would read as well.

There was one circulating where the newspaper headline stated that "A man with no active warrants was shot by police." Which is just about the most nefarious way to say "an innocent man was shot by police".

Isn’t it different? IANAL but having an active warrant issued for you doesn’t really have anything to do with you being guilty or innocent. It just means the police must conduct you to the juge, either because you’re a suspect or (in some countries) a witness.

Edit: I guess this is this story: https://www.actionnews5.com/story/35967817/officers-kill-man...

"A man with no active warrants issued" also perfectly describes every single one of the 9/11 hijackers, but that wouldn't equate out to "innocent" either.

Careful. Presence or absence of warrants has almost nothing to do with getting shot.

Assuming you have no warrants out for your arrest, should you charge at a police officer with a knife or gun drawn while yelling that you were about to kill them, and then ignore any commands they issued, what would you expect to happen?

That one I actually understand. Calling somebody innocent is a very strong and contextual / scoped statement, and ultimately that's what the courts take their time to do (and even they I think kinda stop shy? I don't know if acquitted is the same as innocent. I feel it's more "not proven guilty").

In the US, we have the presumption of innocence. Until a court says you're guilty, you're innocent.

Most modern countries consider this a fundamental right.

In the US, what happens a if a newspaper calls someone innocent, who is then proven guilty?

That was a super high horse you rapidly jumped on, but where I'm going is, it may not be a risk reputable journalism takes lightly.

"No outstanding warrants" will have been true at the time whatever is uncovered later. "They shot a presumed innocent" is probably safe but meaningless. "They shot an innocent person" - what happens if the person is then found super guilty? And innocent of what - what if somebody says "they were clearly in the video driving without their seatbelt" or "they had expired license plate"? USA has a lovely constitution yes, but also a nicely profitable legal industry.

Put the moral notion aside: In the USA, I don't think it's an easy risk to take, and clearly newspapers agree.

Those don't mean the same thing at all, and the headline is weird for any possible set of facts.

The average mass shooter has no active warrants, but most people would consider it correct for the police to shoot him to end his killing spree. The average wanted fugitive, on the other hand is usually arrested without any shooting.

I read the article linked in another comment, and the headline I would give it is "Police kill man while raiding wrong house".

Most people shot by the police don’t already have active warrants. I don’t think “active warrants” means what you think it means.

"Officer involved shooting"

That example seems fine to me. There is clear attribution ("by an officer"), and the "appeared to be aiming" could be to emphasize that the officer was not just generally shooting into crowd, but targeting individuals.

* * *

I liked Zinedine Zidane's:

"I am sorry I was kicked out of the World Cup final but I was not sorry I headbutted him".

Or Eric Cantona

"My best moment? I have a lot of good moments but the one I prefer is when I kicked the hooligan"

He missed a bet in not describing that as a "powerful human mandibular compression"

I've never heard this as an actual term, thank you for sharing.

Submitted for inclusion: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-...

Calling it "exonerative" is like turning passive voice up to 11.

According to some people.

I think this is just a matter of opinion. When something severe happens it's natural to not use the most harsh term to describe the event. It doesn't seems like something malicious.

When describing a death many people will say "they are no longer with us" instead of describing the circumstance of death. When talking about traumatic events we as a society have a natural propensity to not use triggering words. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that unless it's hiding information. As described above no one is hiding anything because we all understand what happened.

Perhaps you could argue over the use of "impacted", but the use of passive voice is pretty objective. "We impacted 17 roles today" or perhaps "I impacted 17 roles today" is, well, it's still pretty bad, but at least it takes some responsibility.

I agree with you, but I think a passive voice is used correctly in that sentence you are referencing. It puts the emphasis on the impacted employees and then goes on to speak to their contributions. This takes away the company for a moment from the conversation to discuss the "impacted teammates". They were using an active voice up till that point.

Death is inevitable, unexpected, unplanned, usually caused by things beyond human control. Layoffs are a planned thing explicitly done by one human to another in order to increase corporate profits.

Layoffs are often a choice between letting a small percentage go or causing the entire company to go out of business.

Do you have some data to back that up? I'm not sure if a small percentage of employees are so expensive as to be the tipping point for a company to go out of business.

Employees are one of or the most expensive part of doing business for many. I guess you could google Gross vs Net margins in various companies or industries as an example (maybe here[1]). But layoffs aren't merely firing people, they are "firing people and not re-hiring for their positions or work." So it's often closing out on entire product strategies, such as the case here with YC.

[1]: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...

> Employees are one of or the most expensive part of doing business for many

Not debating that. I'm debating:

> Layoffs are often a choice between letting a small percentage go or causing the entire company to go out of business

Show me a company that MUST let go a SMALL PERCENTAGE of its workforce in order to not go out of business. Meaning a company which is hanging by a thread and that thread is (again) a small percentage of the workforce. Because if a small percentage of the workforce is expensive enough to provide you with the runway you need to continue doing business, that runway is short enough that the company will cease to exist anyway, so the point is moot.

Layoffs are a consequence of business decisions by a specific corporate entity.

If someone died in a mining accident and their employer sent their partner a letter saying “It appears they’re no longer with us”, that would not be well-received (to say the least). Euphemisms are only appropriate in the right circumstances.

I'm willing to accept this for a company that has verifiable issues that are not just accounting fuckeries (aka owners pulling cash out of the company by having a 2nd company that nominally owns the office building, patent licenses, overseas shell companies): consistent losses, lack of cash, you get the idea.

But for companies pulling in profits to the tune of millions if not billions of dollars in profit?! Their leadership should be terminated before even the lowest performing employee instead of getting paid bonuses for ruining the lives of thousands of people who made their bonuses possible by putting in the work.

If they had stated this exactly as you did it would have been a lot more honest and forthright

When someone is accidental, blameless or unexpected, like someone suddenly dying, it's entirely natural to use something like "passed away". Not the case when someone is directly responsible - "X was murdered by Y" is quite common, I believe?

Please don't compare death with layoffs. One if an inevitable but tragic part of life the other is an inevitable but tragic part of keeping the shareholders happy.

I think the whole notion of companies doing things "for the shareholders" is vastly overblown. Doesn't it make perfect sense on its own that YC realized the late-stage game was not working out, and that they were not going to be able to use those people effectively on other work?

> I think the whole notion of companies doing things "for the shareholders" is vastly overblown.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and I don't share yours. Everything makes sense with the proper framing. My guess is that this has more to do with perception than with actual business needs. I can try as well: Doesn't it make perfect sense that in the current context it's very easy to justify cutting costs which if done during normal times would signal trouble/mismanagement?

>"It doesn't seems like something malicious."

No it seems like weaselicious to me.

“They are no longer with us” is widely understood and very unlikely to be ambiguous. If you said “they were impacted” I would lodge the same complaint.

HR might have an issue about disclosing private personal information about their embarrassing medical digestive system disorders, and implying they were fired for being full of shit.

https://www.webmd.com/digestive-disorders/what-is-fecal-impa...

> When describing a death many people will say "they are no longer with us"

Fussell describes (in Class) this kind of talking-around situations as a "low" marker (in a class-signaling sense). The "high" version is to just plainly state "X died" or "X is dead". Similar for describing things like pregnancy.

Not sure what significance this has for corporate communication, and I'm also not sure how true it is (though all the things he described that I do know about were remarkably accurate) but, well, there's that I guess. Regardless, I'm not sure that kind of avoidant language is natural (though possibly it is, and it has to be trained out to get the more-direct "high" version—but I suspect either preference is mainly a socialization thing).

"John is no longer with us" is a completely reasonable thing to say, unless it's coming from the person who shot John.

When there's a PR person involved, truth goes away, double-speak comes in. Even in the case of YC, which in general is way better than most other organizations.

There's nothing diplomatic about it. It enrages me far more than the truth.

For you, but often for others it doesn't.

It depends on if someone wants to believe the truth, or believe something else. Most want to believe something else.

hackers don't though; as a rule, hackers value truth over comfortable lies.

This isn't the place for hackers.

Why is it the corporation's fault though? We live in a society and governance structure which encourages corporations to consider revenue over everything else. Why would they act differently? What should Google do? Sorry I understand the human cost of layoffs. But it is a reflection of what this society values. If you want corporations to consider the human cost, you need to make it feature in their financials. Or the government should offer better protection to unemployed people.

Never mind "I was impacted by layoffs", I often see "my position was impacted by layoffs"

I was impacted by layoffs recently. As in, my department was good, but for how long? Should I start looking for another job?

To be fair, that's usually accurate - unlike someone getting fired because of their own performance, layoffs are usually untargeted, and include people that were great at their jobs.

And let's face it, getting fired is a huge stigma, so it's totally understandable that someone would phrase it like that, as the victim of the situation

It's hard to blame anyone for using the "soft" terms about their own situation, since firing tends to be a very sensitive topic. It's not hard to blame companies for using those same terms, since it comes off as "MBA-ish" and sleazy.

In many places, without at will employment, you can't lay an individual off, but actually have to make the position redundant.

You are absolutely right. This is the only correct wording.

Passive voice afflicts many people's writing, not just corporations. Yes, it's a bad practice, but I don't feel it's egregious in this case.

That is a reasonable argument if one assumes that this is an unconscious choice, however, passive voice has become the standard with these types of press releases. It is a conscious, intentional choice.

Passive voice is a tool. It’s perfectly valid and grammatical. The problem is the abuse of it to misrepresent one’s agency or responsibility, but there’s nothing wrong with the sentence, “I was hit by a car on the way to work.”

The issue with corporate passive is that business language is not only ugly but serves evil purposes. In person, it exists to slow down bad news so you can read and manipulate people (“string betting”) and, on paper, its raison d’etre is to project authority to which one has no actual right.

Does this accomplish anything other than increasing resentment?

Begs the question, what do you think companies gain by using such passive language?

Sometimes it's not for the company but for the person who was laid off.

To mean that the person was laid off but it wasn't their fault. It's their position that was impacted. Somehow.

Result the same but sentiment might be dulled a little. Not blaming the person but blaming external conditions that resulted in someone being made redundant.

when you first read it, did you feel better or worse for the employees when they wrote impacted vs "laid off"

I went back to GitLab's announcement, because I thought it was better: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2023/02/09/gitlab-news/

Turns out, it says: "reduce the size of our team by 7%", which also isn't as specific as the OP is suggesting.

HOWEVER, they then go on to spend more than half of their post explaining how the impacted staff is supported, and YES, that did make me feel better.

You have to stop and think about what it really means. "Impacted" just means something happened. You have to do the legwork to get to "called into a meeting and fired."

Distancing. It lets people who make these decisions portray themselves as the helpless victims of the way things are, rather than people who have made choices that have led to this.

"The market says that we need to downsize" sounds a lot better than "an investment analyst says I go, or you go".

A number of reasons already discussed, but in person it has the “benefit” of slowing down (drawing out) bad news. It’s like string betting in poker, but it’s also a way of showing dominion over time (by burying the lede and making someone anxious.)

Yes. It makes one admit to a mistake. Intellectual honesty. “We failed” instead of “we are a victim of circumstances”.

It's precise, and language should be precise: http://www.butte.edu/departments/cas/tipsheets/style_purpose....

Maybe they weren’t fired? The way the post was worded has me wondering if they’ll be retrained and have their roles changed to fit YC’s new needs.

Exactly the point - passive, weak, blameless terms makes it nebulous on what has happened. Just say you want you need to say - you're the captain of the ship.

Oh c'mon, there's no way this is it. If they hadn't been laid off there wouldn't be an external announcement. You don't post something like this merely to announce that you're retraining some employees.

They were 100% laid off. The wording is intentional and standard for the industry.

You aren't "impacted" by changing roles or retraining, you're impacted by losing your job.

"we want to acknowledge and express our appreciation for their substantial contributions" translates to "these people will no longer be contributing as they are laid off effective immediately".

It is important to keep in mind that the companies are the ones doing the impacting. They don't have to lay people off, they're choosing to.

They wouldn't announce it if that were the case. I am curious whether it would have been announced at all without all the heightened economic fear.

There isn't even a need for a public blog post about this change in business strategy. This reads fine as an internal email, but I've never worked at a company that publicly referenced their layoffs.

Laid off is itself a less harsh version of fired.

They're not quite the same, those two terms have taken on different meanings. "Fired" has come to mean "for cause", and "laid off" has come to mean "not for cause".

My hunch is that the evolution was driven by executives, probably in the 70s and 80s, that didn’t want to say they were firing people in order to make more money.

In other words the same dynamic that now leads to ‘impacted’.

It’s a very useful distinction; it likely would have evolved one way or another.

In the UK they have the term "redundancy" (as in "your position has been made redundant"). Can't see that term catching on in the US but it does cover the use of "laid off" to mean "the company chose to eliminate the position I worked in rather than choosing to get rid of me as a person", and thus may carry less stigma.

Some members of my family (back in the day) used to be laid off from positions seasonally, and were then rehired the next year.

I suspect that in its early versions, it referred more to the notion that "we won't have any more work until the spring, so we'll see you then."

I don't know its etymology or when it might have been coopted by employers who didn't intend to rehire, but I suspect its intent is to signal that there's no ill will between the employer and the employee, and that it WOULD rehire those impacted persons in the future.

I'm not as sure that it means anything so specific now.

Manufacturing can still work like this (and maybe other industries?). You're laid off every now and then, if work slows down, but with the expectation (possibly contractually—many of these have unions) that you'll be brought back when work picks back up. AFAIK they can collect unemployment during the lay-off, so it's better than being kept on with much-reduced hours.

It’s the opposite: they started out distinct, but then, by the euphemism treadmill, became used interchangeably.

And if you go back even further it meant something even milder, like furloughed or terminated with the intent to rehire when expected business picks up.

For some, "laid off" has the same connotation as furlough.

It had that connotation 50 years ago, but anyone who thinks it still does is just confused.

A furloughed employee has the expectation that employment can resume with the company, while a laid off employee does not. This is important for tax and other legal considerations.

This very much depends on where you are. For example in the UK a lay off technically means being told to stay at home because there isn't enough work [1], although it's often used these days to mean "fired without cause", i.e. the American usage of lay off has become more common and it has simultaneously became common to use the term "furlough" to describe layoffs during the pandemic.

[1]https://www.gov.uk/lay-offs-short-timeworking

And "laid off" means eligble for uneployment; "fired" often does not.

Ehhhh… fired for misconduct, sure. Fired because you can’t do the job? You probably qualify for unemployment.

Employers sure have a vested interest in making you believe otherwise, tho.

I still retain a similar model to patio11: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1532509304846135296?s=20

Regardless of how you want to word it, or how you perceive it to play out socially, it does not diminish the act.

It depends on the listener's relationship with the person in question.

If you're on the receiving end, then that model and the act done to you are irrelevant.

If someone is applying for a job and they tell you "I was fired from my last job" vs "I was laid off from my last job", that changes your perspective on them.

Having terms that distinguish whether or not it's "for cause" are a useful language feature.

In the US, “laid off” has a pretty substantially different meaning than “fired”.

“Laid off” usually means that the company shut down a group of roles, and the individuals happened to be in those roles and so lost their jobs.

“Fired” usually means that the individual was intentionally let go because of behavior / competence / etc. of the individual, not the group.

Here we say maid redundant if someone is laid off like this.

Fired -> Let go -> Laid off -> Impacted

I'll be curious to see what comes next.

Fired still semi-exists. Let go seems to show up for insufficient performance, e.g. semi-amicable “it’s not working out”. Fired shows up when somebody really screwed up, e.g. laws were broken or products failed.

"Let go" is the worst, it implies "I let you go" -> "I allow you to leave" which is the ultimate humiliation when you are getting fired

I think of it more like the protagonist (or antagonist, one could argue) of a movie holding on to the hand of someone (employee) about to fall off of a cliff (the descent, ultimately, to poverty and homelessness) just to make the metaphor as vivid as possible.

"Fixed the error"

Completed? (like in Never let me go[0])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Let_Me_Go_(novel)

Carousel!

Terminated is to the left of fired.

Playing around at the online etymology dictionary, it appears dismiss is the oldest—early 15th century. Sack and fire are from the 19th century, and laid off in this sense isn’t until the 1960s. Terminate, as in dismiss from a job, is first attested in 1973.

Selected for new and exciting opportunities!

Reassigned to an external role

Role is "disestablished"

Can’t we all just agree on “shit canned”?

“Today we are announcing that 10% of our company is being shit canned”.

Hard to get more vague than impacted, that could mean anything. I was impacted by reading this bland PR release.

Impacted still implies some causal connection, so the next level of doublespeak must avoid that, then. John was affine to the event.

For Sun Microsystems executives in the 90's, it was:

"Promoted to Vice President of Looking for a New Job"

One term I've heard from HR was "Released to the industry."

I always wondered if that was focus grouped or something. It was definitely the running joke for a while.

Fifteen years ago I remember my last employer saying in a division meeting that they had "reallocated a number of roles to the mobility pool". A round of confused "what's that then" from more or less all present forced them to be less euphemistic.

Depends on the circumstances. I associate “fired” with a negative reason (e.g. performance, theft, harassment). “Laid-off” doesn’t carry the same connotation.

They give "layoff packages" but not "firing packages".

We hereby lay their employment with us to rest.

They're related, I suppose. But there's a real, meaningful difference between the two.

fired usually means, with cause. laid off is for when a lot of people are getting cut at the same time because upper management asked to do big cuts

Yes, and importantly if you are laid off you generally can get unemployment compensation. If you are fired for cause you often cannot.

There’s usually a significant difference for the individual where laid off means you get unemployment while fired (implies cause) does not.

Depends on the cause. In most situations that aren’t blatant misconduct you qualify for unemployment.

I actually believe he put out a 10/10 example of how this should be done. We all know what he meant, he was concise and then reminded you of the mission and that this is all about the mission.

Maybe you can grant him 9/10, but you always have to deduct some points for hiding behind euphemisms.

9 would be far too high IMHO.

If you’re laying people off, say it straight and with a backbone. The language is passive, weak and makes it sound like a mere consequence of a slight breeze upon a dainty leaf causing it to gently fall from a tree.

17 people lost their jobs. Likely many of those have families to feed, houses to uphold and bills to pay. In this economy, the same will likely happen to many of us and a statement like the above would feel like a punch to the gut.

The uppercut that follows is:

> we want to acknowledge and express our appreciation for their substantial contributions.

Saying you want to acknowledge and express something is not the same thing as acknowledging and expressing something. A statement would struggle to get more generic than this.

nah. im not a retarded pussy, so I don't have a problem with tone. I've never dyed my hair purple (im pretty sure that shit seeps into the brain).

I knew an ex co-worker who grew up in another country whose manager, in a "sync up meeting", told him that he was "impacted" and he didn't need to continue work on his current sprint. He came out of the meeting with a smile, had no idea what this meant, and he showed up the next day.

Damn that sucks dude probably thought he was being praised or something.

Did he get to keep his red stapler?

While those examples do use the passive voice, the passive is not the real problem. "These events impacted seventeen of our teammates" is the active voice, and it is no more forthright. "Mistakes were made by Bob, Sean, and Susan, who have been fired" is (if accurate) quite clear about assigning blame while using the passive. It's true that some people overuse the passive, and for those people noticing and considering whether to rephrase can produce better writing, but insisting on forgoing the passive entirely probably won't. If we want to prevent evasive writing, we should look for and call out evasive writing, whatever voice is used.

To me it’s the phrase “these events” like it’s something beyond their control. Replacing that with “our decision” would be taking more ownership.

Edit: re-reading TFA, they don’t attribute the layoffs to “these events” so I’ll amend this as being a response directly to the parent comment.

Right, the active construction does grammatically require we put something there, where in the passive we get to omit it, which is why the passive is sometimes used for evasion. But if you're interested in whether someone is being evasive, just... look at whether they're actually assigning agency appropriately. Grammatical form doesn't answer that.

See also https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=passive for much related amusement.

YC is not special. It’s a business and they’ll use weasel words like the rest of them.

What you're talking about linguistically is the difference between passive voice ("I was laid off") vs active voice ("YC fired me"). It is a pervasive technique and a form of blame-shifting. Whenver you see a headline, ask yourself which voice is being used and why. It is a key part of media literacy.

Perhaps they meant seventeen of their teammates have impacted colons? It's an odd thing to share, yes, but these are trying times.

This comment comes across as a silly nitpick given the sober content of the post, but I think it is completely fair given Paul Graham's many writings and tweets on the virtues of writing clearly and his hatred of what I call corporatese.

Not sure how involved pg was with this post as its stated author Garry Tan

You would imagine he read it at some point. You would also imagine his CEO would have internalised Paul Graham's most important piece of advice about communication (writing clearly).

I have no inside information on this one, but YC has been around for 18 years, and pg left the president role 9 years ago. It's been about half of YC's life that he's been out of the day-to-day stuff. It's absolutely not obvious that he'd be reading each announcement that goes out (I'd be surprised at such).

I don’t think it comes across as a silly nitpick, and I’ve read very little PG has written. It’s useful to identify how phrasing and framing of communication can be used to manipulate how that communication is received, regardless of who is communicating. And I think the same observation would have been made if this were a post about any other organization.

It is laudable that this observation was very close to the top when I clicked to see the comments. I’d be surprised if this critique gets buried by HN moderation, and cautiously hopeful it won’t get buried by folks biased to defend YC &co.

But the exact same language from any other source would be examined exactly the same way, and for very good reason.

This immediately stood out to me as well! It didn't come across as tactful, just bizarre

I, too, prefer that companies spoke in direct, plain terms, without PR shenanigans.

Does anyone know why do they do this, though? Is it to de-risk potential lawsuits or do they believe people prefer that way ("sounds professional")?

A combination of cargo culting/"sounds professional", and just wanting to make yourself/company look less bad.

Assuming legal signed off on the basic message, I'm guessing it's out of a sense of 'politeness' in a delicate situation. Consider how someone might publicly communicate a relationship breakdown with language like "we're parting ways" or "we have made the decision to end our marriage." Sometimes you get plain, direct language but people might infer acrimony from it.

My sense is that in the particular case of layoffs, companies are hesitant to actually use the phrase "laid off" because it triggers a sense of implicit shame in those affected. There is definitely an unspoken assumption that folks who get laid off are underperformers, and the extent to which we talk about how untrue that is (see: LinkedIn) shows how pervasive the assumption is.

Cowardice

You fired someone? You're to blame. Someone was impacted? Sounds more like an act of nature. Nobody is to blame!

Just read it in a dental sense: seventeen of our molars were impacted today, and had to be extracted.

> Never allow corporations to speak in passive, weak, blameless terms.

And yet, when they don't they tend to be excoriated for being harsh and cruel.

So whaddya do?