Ask vs. Question

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Anna. I’m calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hello, Anna. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Anna.

What’s up?

Well, I have a question about the word ask.

I am a consultant in the electric power industry, and over the last few years, I’ve been involved with a lot of projects where we have to report to executives, and usually we’re wanting something from them, such as more time or more money or something like that.

Whenever we are creating presentations for these groups of executives, people always say to me, what is the ask? We need to really narrow down that ask, and we need to frame the ask correctly.

So basically they are changing the word ask from a verb into a noun.

And I have to confess, it drives me absolutely crazy because I feel like we already have words that they could be using, for example, question or request.

It seems to me that, you know, a request for the executive would work just as well.

So my question was really if you had any idea when this started and why it started and why business people love to create new words all the time.

Ask is weird because you grow up not hearing it the way that you’re hearing it now, right? It sounds just kind of weird.

And linguists call that process nominalization, where you take a word that doesn’t usually function as a noun and make it function that way.

Like, I don’t know, do you and your colleagues talk about epic fails?

All the time.

All the time.

Okay, and does that bother you or just strike you weird or does it seem clever or what?

You know what? That one doesn’t bother me probably because I started hearing that one when I was a teenager and I thought it was, you know, new and fun.

Right.

And so you heard ask for most of your life as a verb, right? And then when you get into the business world and it becomes a noun.

And there are a lot of words that do that.

You know, we talk about the big reveal in a Hollywood movie or…

Instead of revelation.

Yeah, yeah, the big reveal.

And I’m thinking of the opposite of ask, tell.

You know, when we talk about poker, a tell is a gesture or an expression that tells something about what you’re feeling.

In the case of ask, in the business world, I think it does have a more specific shade of meaning, a kind of specificity to it.

So you’re saying that a question or request wouldn’t quite work.

That’s what I’m thinking.

I mean, I know in the fundraising world, an ask is something very specific.

You’re not just making a general ask. You’re asking for $10,000 or something like that.

The other weird thing about ask as a noun is that it goes back a thousand years or so.

Isn’t that weird?

Really?

Yeah.

Wow.

I had no idea.

Even before, modern English was modern English, like back into English that doesn’t look like English.

Yeah, old English in 900 or so.

And that’s in part because we didn’t have the word request at that point.

And I’m assuming we didn’t have question.

I’m not sure about that one.

But I know that we didn’t have request, which came to us from French in the 14th century.

So in the business world, I used to be bothered by the notion of ask.

But more and more, it seems like business jargon that’s kind of useful.

Yeah. I mean, now that you’ve explained it, I can see where it, you know, is a little bit more more functional than I thought.

And you guys use it a lot then or your colleagues?

Yeah, we use it all the time, and it most often does involve money.

The ask is usually for a million dollars or something like that.

Yeah, or for somebody to do a specific thing, right?

Right, yeah.

It’s usually when they’re trying to zero in on the specific thing that they want the executives to do.

Yeah, so it almost always involves asking upper management or leadership or something.

Right, right.

Well, my suspicion, and I think Grant will agree with me, is that it’s going to become more and more common because of its utility.

Yeah, if you search in the news index like Factiva or LexisNexis, you will see a gradual increase over time proportionally of the use of a variety of constructions that use ask as a noun, like make an ask or making an ask.

And it’s really interesting. This falls squarely into what Martha was saying about this kind of business jargon that repels people but is so useful.

And it partly repels people because they are newcomers to it.

And so we have this kind of like, oh, there’s a symbol, the sign of the foreigner, the outsider, the person who doesn’t belong.

Let’s reject it.

And we have to slowly accommodate ourselves to the fact that we are now insiders in the group that uses the language that we despise.

Exactly.

Yeah, it usually takes me a few years to warm up to any new business word.

Thank you so much for your call.

Oh, well, thank you.

This helped me out a lot.

Thank you very much.

Sure.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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