Rocking in the Free World

Ever since I joined work four years ago, I’ve heard the following two expressions being used in a manner that I find weird / counter-intuitive compared to how I’d heard them being used conventionally on previous occasions.

The first one is the usage of the term ‘Geography‘ as a noun to refer to a particular region of the world. I’d remained blissfully untouched by this apparent misuse of the word until the completion of engineering college. Until then, geography was what I fervently believe it should always be – describing and writing about the earth.

Now, it is being used to refer to continents / countries on earth, such as the ‘Asia-Pac Geography’ and the ‘Europe Geography’ and so on. Whatever happened to using plain and simple ‘regions’ instead of saying ‘geography’?

The next thing that had me in splits the first time I heard it was the usage of the term ‘based out of‘. During campus recruit assimilation in 2004 at the only company I’ve been employed at so far, some big cheese spoke about how he was ‘based out of’ many locations during his career and ‘worked out of’ many important sounding places.

The little Hari inside my head was conjuring up images of how a person would be able to work, logically, in every place except the one he mentioned, if one were to take him literally. So, if someone were to tell you that he/she worked out of Bangalore, you’d assume that he/she would work every other place EXCEPT in Bangalore, but you’ll unfortunately realize that this is not the case.

Somehow the regular usage of ‘I am working at’ such and such office in this city has been discarded in favour of a seemingly complicated utterance.

Mercifully, these are two instances where TechSpeak is used blatantly, but doesn’t defy grammatical boundaries beyond a certain measure.

And to think of how I am accused of being sesquipedalian, when I just use big words instead of small without trying to alter the fundamental meaning of the sentences.