Overnighted

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hello, who’s this?

Oh, my name is Carla, and I’m from San Diego, California, and I just had a question for you.

How can we help you, Carla?

Well, I listen to your show all the time, and I was in my office the other day, and all the women erupted over the word overnighting, because every time we put it in the computer, the spell check says it’s wrong.

And we all know what it means, and we all agree that it definitely is a word.

However, I thought, well, what a great question for Way With Words.

So I wanted to see if you had any thoughts about whether it was a word or if it’s slang.

And so you mean you’re sending a package or something for delivery tomorrow morning, right?

Yeah.

Or the next day.

I think that’s ridiculous.

There’s two paths to take here on this.

First, let’s just talk about the technology for a second.

We’ve done this before, but it bears repeating.

The spell checkers and grammar checkers that are in Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office and Outlook and all those other programs, whether it’s in Firefox or Apple Mail or whatever you’re using to compose your documents, are guidelines.

Okay.

They are not the definitive word on this stuff.

Just treat the red squiggles underneath the words as a reminder to pay attention.

Yeah.

Not necessarily advice to change it, but to say, oh, hey, I think this word is unusual.

Just make sure it’s right.

Right.

They’re guidelines, but they’re red squiggly guidelines.

And, you know, and if it’s fine, you can actually go out.

I think you can right-click on the squiggle and add it to your user dictionary, and it will never come up again.

Yes, and I will definitely do that.

I just wanted to make sure that, you know, especially since it’s a work email, that it wasn’t sounding like a complete idiot.

No, no, no. You have our permission.

Overnight as a verb is completely 100% standard American English.

There is nothing wrong with it.

Great. Well, I’ll share this with the ladies. I appreciate that.

Great. And maybe overnight a message to Microsoft.

They should change that. That’s ridiculous.

Well, they do update their dictionaries with every release of the software.

But they have a problem where dictionaries themselves are kind of conservative about their inclusion.

And so there’s this series of delays.

So your software dictionaries are going to be 5, 10, 15, even 20 years behind mainstream English.

Certainly they can’t keep up with all the new jargon.

And it’s probably not their business to try.

They’re more interested in mainstream English, the most likely cases, and they do a pretty decent job of just bringing stuff to your attention.

So do you agree if everyone has the same idea of what it means and it’s an understandable message to relay, then it’s probably acceptable?

Yes.

Yeah, I think especially in a business concept.

Right.

If everyone in your office agrees on this and it’s the right context for it, absolutely.

Okay.

Where you run into problems is when one group agrees and another group disagrees, and that’s when we have conflicts, and that’s why we have a radio show to talk about them.

Yeah, I just didn’t want to interpret it as slang.

No, no.

No, you’re good.

It’s business jargon, but it’s totally fine business jargon.

Great.

It’s almost not jargon.

No, that’s what I’m saying.

It’s standard American business jargon.

It’s like perfect, and some dictionaries even have it in there.

It’s not a big deal.

All right.

Well, thank you.

Our pleasure.

Have a wonderful day.

Yeah, you too, Carla.

Thanks for calling.

Okay, bye.

Bye.

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