“Simply” Wrong
This morning in a meeting, an account manager voiced an opinion: “well, you simply have to X…” Irrespective of the content, and of any thoughts merits of the words of an account manager in an engineering discussion, I was suddenly aware of that word, “simply.” How easily it trips off the tongue! It and its cousins “just”, “only” (and “easily”) slip so – well, simply – into conversation; they are so often that they are usually ignored. But they still affect the tone of the sentence, of the discussion itself. They diminish the things that we engineers have to get to the bottom of. In this morning’s case, it was a process: “simply insert it and tighten it.” Account Manager talk, yes, but do you see how quickly that trivialises the problem, without adding anything useful to the discussion? In fact, in the spirit of thinking things through, I would propose that…