Why all of a sudden (well, let’s say the last year or so) are people afraid to use the word “problems”, substituting the therapy-speak euphemism “issues” when it’s clear from context that they mean indeed problems.
problem : a matter or situation regarded as unwelcome or harmful and needing to be dealt with and overcome
I see this even on customer support web pages: known “issues” with this or that product. Yes, even inanimate objects have “issues” these days. I heard someone say recently that his printer was having “issues”.
More seriously, it’s a form of perception damage control. We see this all the time in software development - you never, ever, ever tell a customer that the program has a bug. If you do, they’ll come away from that with the notion that you’re admitting your program is buggy, and maybe go looking for a company who doesn’t admit to having a buggy program. Of course, pretty much all programs have bugs, even the other guys, so that damage in their perception of us isn’t even merited - and even if it was, we’d still want to avoid it.
So, we use innocuous words, to reduce the risk of damage to our image. And to make sure we don’t use them in front of customers, we use the innocuous words everywhere. We don’t have bugs, we have ‘defect’. We don’t have design errors reports, we have ‘change requests’. And so on and so forth.
And it’s not a new phenomena. How long have armies had “caualties” rather than “injuries and deaths”?
In a society organized around the drive to acquire money, everything will eventually be corrupted, including the language. Words are constantly changed and even invented in order to give misleading, dishonest impressions of situations. Why did employees become “associates” or “team members”? Why are pork-barrel handouts now “stimulus packages”? Because with the new terms, it’s tougher to realize what’s happening. An employee is obviously subservient, while an associate is less likely to realize how low his or her status is. Pork-barrel handouts obviously benefit only the recipients, but a stimulus package sounds like it will benefit everyone.
I’ve heard the term “issues” used to refer to bugs and problems as long as I’ve been working (since 1996) so I suspect the OP is new to the professional world.
“Associates” typically refer to professionals who are below “management” in an organization. Both would be considered “employees”
I think every associate realizes exactly where he stands on the totem pole. I believe that the use of inflated terms to refer to your employees is more for the benefit of the companies clients to give the impression of more experienced and important professionals. An entry-level employee is a “first year analyst”, a mid-level manager is a “vice-president” and so on.
But you are correct. Language is used to shape perceptions. Instead of a “bug” or “problem” which has negative connotations, the more neutral term “issue” is used. The client is unhappy with something. It could be a problem with the project, or it could be that the client misunderstands some aspect of the project. So we say it is an “issue” to avoid casting blame and we set about resolving it.
Even the way you crafted your post demonstrates a riduculous anti-capitalist bias that distracts from the point at hand. This statement:
aside from being factually incorrect is also rife with logical fallacies (everything will not necessarily be corrupted and this is not limited to capitalist societies). A more neutral and accurate way to phrase this would be:
In a society that is dependent on people convincing other people of ideas, decisions and goals, language can sometimes be corrupted to provide information with the intent to mislead or obfuscate.
Funny you should mention this. Just the other day, my 18 year old daughter responded to my hairy eyeball by asking “What’s your issue?” For a second, I thought that maybe she’dhad some experience with a therapist or something.
I’ve had “issues” ever since I started at my current job, eleven years ago. That’s how people referred to them.
I won’t even go into the e-mail from someone who said we were “efforting” a solution for the client. :rolleyes:
I think issue sounds less traumatic, yeah, it’s something we have to deal with, and it differentiates it from the real problems (server crashes, power outages, etc.)
would they really? have you ever tried it? maybe they’d find it refreshing to deal with a company that is more open and honest if you just said “yes its a bug, we’ve already isolated it and we’re working on fixing it right now”.
You’ve got it backwards. These things have always been issues but up until recently people have been afraid to call them that and euphemistically called them problems instead.
The first step was admitting we had an issue with the word issue.
When I stocked shelves at K-Mart, I was definitely an “associate”, never an “employee”. Used correctly, associate should employ someone entering a partnership, so in cases like mine it was misleading. As for your claim that everybody knows where they stand in the corporate hierarchy, that’s true, but the language still matters. That was one them that George Orwell hammered on in 1984. On the surface, nobody was fooled by the government’s language. Below the surface, that language gradually eroded important distinctions and weakened convictions. The same happens in real life. Why is the government department that attacks other countries called the “Department of Defense”? Because if people hear it often enough, it pushes them towards associating America’s military offenses with national defense.
Exactly as you suspect, it’s a euphemism intended to minimize the seriousness of the problem being discussed. Everybody knows an issue is a problem, but if the people marketing the thing that has the problem are able to create a little uncertainty and a little false assurance, they’ve done their jobs.
I could have sworn Carlin did a little humor on this issue/problem substitution, but if he did, I can’t find it. In any case I know someone on the Dope used to have a sig that pointed out a similar situation: the replacement of “problem” with “challenge.” The joke was something like “A challenge is not the same thing as a problem, otherwise the space shuttle would have been called The Problemer.”
I haven’t tried it personally - besides kinda liking my job, given my position in the company I don’t believe I’ve ever actually spoken or communicated with a real customer.
Also, I’m not really liking the odds of the gamble you propose. By my thinking, it would only help with customers who are so sick of the padded words that they actually react negatively to them. The rest of people either don’t notice or don’t care, and would still prefer the sound of “That’s a known issue,” over “Yeah, we know our program is buggy as hell. So what?”
Also it may be worth noting that just because we know about it, doesn’t mean we’re working on it. We have limited resources and plenty of defects*, not to mention that we need to keep popping out actual upgrades and new products or slip backwards in the marketplace. So, for any given defect*, unless it’s like, bad, we probably have something better to do and are doing that instead. So, it’s not “yes its a bug, we’ve already isolated it and we’re working on fixing it right now”. It’s “Yes it’s a bug, we know about it and haven’t done a thing to fix it.”
Suddenly pussyfooting and near-equivocating starts to sound pretty good.
I actually used this term without even noticing I did. :smack: Of course I meant, “Our program is buggy as hell and teeters on the edge of complete collapse at any moment.”
Reflecting that I’ve also heard “problems” called “issues” as long as I’ve been out of college and in the work force. In fact, I remember a conversation soon after I started in which I had used the word “problem” on the phone and I was told not to use that word and use “issue” instead. As others said, it really comes down to assigning blame. “Problem” carries with it the implication that someone is responsible for breaking something while an “issue” may or may not have blame associated with it, so we could just fix it and not have to worry about who to blame.
Incidentally, I actually find this usage amusing. Toward a piece of technology, saying it has a problem is fine, because it doesn’t have feelings to hurt, but saying it has issues anthropomorphizes it so it’s not having a problem because it’s broken, it’s having issues because it needs therapy. Maybe I’m just looking too deeply into it.
