In Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, Dan Lyons writes about slang he heard during his time working at a hot new startup. If someone was fired, that person was described as having graduated, and the word delight and the neologism delightion were used as terms for what the company aimed to provide to customers. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Graduating from a Startup”
You may have heard about this new book by Dan Lyons called Disrupted.
It’s subtitled My Misadventure in the Startup Bubble.
Yeah, I read a couple of the articles that he wrote based upon the book.
Actually, I might have read the articles that preceded the book.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, then maybe you know about what he reports about language in terms of the term graduate.
In a startup.
Graduate.
I don’t know exactly what that is in a startup.
He says that in the startup where he worked, when someone gets quit or gets fired, the event is referred to as graduation.
So you might get an email that says, team, just letting you know that Derek has graduated.
Oh, no.
And then you go out into the open office space and you don’t see Derek or his stuff anymore.
Is that jocular slang?
Or is that like business jargon gone awry?
I don’t know.
It’s hard to know, right?
I don’t know. Dan, for people who haven’t read the book, is a guy in his 50s who worked at a startup for several months.
With lots of young people where he was by far and away the oldest person there, right?
Right, right.
And so he brought his skills with him, but there was a lot of culture shock. Part of it was age difference.
Yes, yes.
And another term that he picked up there was delightion.
Delightion, what’s that?
It’s a made-up term that they used in that company to refer to pleasing customers, delighting customers.
And I have heard that from people in the tech world, that we’re designing for delight and delight this and delight that.
But delition is a word.
Delition.
That’s a new to me.
It is now.
