{"id":22213,"date":"2008-05-22T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-22T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2008\/05\/22\/microspeak-on-board-verb\/"},"modified":"2008-05-22T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-22T10:00:00","slug":"microspeak-on-board-verb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20080522-00\/?p=22213","title":{"rendered":"Microspeak: On-board (verb)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here are a few citations.  On a list of activities:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"m\">\n<ul>\n<li>On-board a new team member. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p> Presumably they mean <i>bring<\/i> on board. What makes this particularly interesting is that they didn&#8217;t convert a noun to a verb; they converted a <i>prepositional phrase<\/i> to a verb, demonstrating once again the malleability of the English language.\n Here&#8217;s a snippet from a blog post which seems to use the same meaning, but dispensing with the hyphen:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"m\"><p> Over the past 4 weeks, we have been <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/ssds\/archive\/2008\/05\/02\/8450444.aspx\"> onboarding<\/a> customers slowly. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> On the other hand, there are usages whose intended meaning I can&#8217;t quite figure out. Some titles from documents I don&#8217;t have access to:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"m\"><p> How to On-Board Tools on the Extranet<br \/> On-Boarding Kit <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> And a subsection from an old document:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"m\"><p>  <b>On-Board Schedule<\/b> <\/p>\n<table border=\"1\" rules=\"all\" style=\"border-collapse: collapse\" cellpadding=\"3\">\n<tr>\n<th>Milestone<\/th>\n<th>Target Date<\/th>\n<th>Status<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Attend a client planning meeting<\/td>\n<td>Dec. 2005<\/td>\n<td>Complete<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Frooble analysis<\/td>\n<td><\/td>\n<td>Meeting daily with ABC team     to map out migration<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>On-Board to client dev<\/td>\n<td>Feb. 2006<\/td>\n<td><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Client dev<\/td>\n<td>TBD<\/td>\n<td><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>On-Board to client test<\/td>\n<td>TBD<\/td>\n<td><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Client test complete<\/td>\n<td>TBD<\/td>\n<td><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>On-Board to DEF<\/td>\n<td>TBD<\/td>\n<td><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>DEF sign-off by GHI<\/td>\n<td>TBD<\/td>\n<td><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>File migration<\/td>\n<td>TBD<\/td>\n<td><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Go-Live<\/td>\n<td>TBD<\/td>\n<td><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p> ABC, DEF, and GHI were TLAs I did not understand. Frooble is a made-up word substituting for the actual word in the schedule. (And yes, &#8220;Go-Live&#8221; is a noun.)\n As a final example, there is somebody at Microsoft whose official job title is <i>Senior Onboarding Manager<\/i>.\n If you can figure out what <i>on-board<\/i> means, you&#8217;re smarter than me.<\/p>\n<p> <b>Pre-emptive clever comment<\/b>: <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2006\/04\/17\/577484.aspx#577760\"> Verbing<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2007\/10\/10\/5386979.aspx#5440628\"> weirds<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2007\/12\/21\/6822554.aspx#6838359\"> language<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here are a few citations. On a list of activities: On-board a new team member. Presumably they mean bring on board. What makes this particularly interesting is that they didn&#8217;t convert a noun to a verb; they converted a prepositional phrase to a verb, demonstrating once again the malleability of the English language. Here&#8217;s a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[105,103],"class_list":["post-22213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-microspeak","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Here are a few citations. On a list of activities: On-board a new team member. Presumably they mean bring on board. What makes this particularly interesting is that they didn&#8217;t convert a noun to a verb; they converted a prepositional phrase to a verb, demonstrating once again the malleability of the English language. Here&#8217;s a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22213\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}