I hear it often in a certain commercial and sometimes elsewhere.
In the commercial they say “You plus us and we plus you” Maybe this comes from social media?
How can I make them stop.
Peace,
mangeorge
Tell them to use the equally grating transitive “grow” instead.
Welcome to the real world of language.
Since you can’t stop this, why not use it? Every time you hear “plus” used in this way, change it in your head to “fuck”.
You fuck us and we fuck you.
Don’t you feel better now?
I associate it with corporate lingo, especially in the entertainment industry. e.g. The writers describe the monster in the script, then the design team plus it.
Moderator Action
Whether or not pluissing something is an acceptable verb is a factual question. Asking how to make them stop is an advice question. Because the latter is included in the OP, let’s move this over to IMHO where advice can be given. The factual aspect of the topic may still be answered there as well.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
Verbing weirds language.
Hasn’t grow always been transitive … like crops and stuff?
I’m not getting plus as a verb at all though. Is it a Facebook thing?
I don’t know if it’s a weird hybrid or something but generally people are ok with grow used transitively in agricultural contexts (grow wheat, grow corn, grow crops) but it makes their teeth itch in other arenas (grow money, grow the economy, grow personnel). Dunno why.
edit: I’ve become semantically satiated in regards to grow now.
It’s advertising lingo for the Sutter hospital group primarily in California and Hawaii. No one uses that phraseology in the real world, social media or otherwise.
I think it’s the inherent metaphor. Grow can just mean to make larger, but, in agricultural contexts, it means something closer to “make happen.” Since “grow” is used transitively only in the latter use, using it elsewhere comes off as having the same meaning. Yet that’s not what it means. It sorta works with money in some cases, as you can plant “seed money,” but it doesn’t work at all with an economy or personnel. You aren’t planting some to get more.
Plus “growing something” is usually a more personal process that takes time and effort. Yet the business use often misses one of these two requirements. Either it’s not personal, being something that is affected greatly by the efforts someone other than the “farmers,” like improving the economy, or it is really easy, like adding more people to your workplace.
As for “plus”, the problem is not just that a word is being verbed. See, for example, how “verbed” doesn’t grate all that much? It still feels like a verb. This is not the case with “plus.” The same construction already exists where plus is a conjunction. Thus “We plus you” feels like a sentence fragment, part of “We plus you equals X.” So we actually have to stop and go back to understand what’s being said. That makes “plus” far more irritating.
Perfect!
The first thing that came to mind is how small children talk about arithmetic. I was always irritated by classmates who would say to plus something or minus something or times something.
This is what I was thinking. I’ve only heard it used by Sutter, but goodness knows I hear it enough. My husband works there at corporate in the IT department. I keep trying to get him to mess up the computer of whoever it was who came up with it. I hate it.
I’ve got your back in that
Because it reduces personnel to just another crop.
Same as when the HR jackasses refer to personnel as “assets”, which just reduces them to figures in a T-account.
I get the same feeling with HR itself–human resources, as if we’re just another commodity to be mined and exploited.
Yeah…we weren’t consulted on the change.
That’s all I’m sayin’.