Larry Osterman (long time MS Employee) has a good post today about how peopls within MS have started "nounifying" the word "ask". Like Larry, I think it sounds pretty silly but it got me thinking about a similar pet peeve I’ve got.

Verbifying the word “architect”. You see this a lot on technical blogs, with usage along the lines of “the last system I architected had…” or “we’re currently architecting a distributed widgetizer…”. What’s wrong with the word “design”? Do you think Frank Lloyd Wright ever said to anyone “I had a great time architecting the Guggenheim… ”? Did I.M. Pei ever tell anyone “I architected the crap out of the Javits…”? No — they were designers. Architects design and engineers build. It’s been that way since the dawn of the t-square.

I’m pretty sure I’ve got some others along these lines, but I’ll need another meeting to jog my memory.