[Bassilisk]

Not a native English speaker, but when exactly did "lessons" get replaced by "learnings"?

To me the latter always sounds very unsophisticated.

[OJFord]

Ha, some time this century for sure. To me it's not 'unsophisticated' exactly, but it's definitely a certain sort of person - it's the 'Hi team - just sharing some learnings - please do reach out if you have any questions' sort of corporate speak.

[mp05]

Yeah I love those meetings where we have to double-click on a pain point and unpack what's going on so that we can do the work and stop treading water.

[JasonSage]

Not to discredit your experience, but I'm a native English speaker and I've never had the perception that it's unsophisticated. I think they can have a very slightly different connotation from one another, but in a lot of usage I think they're interchangeable.

[ibejoeb]

It's corporate-speak. There are all sorts of these things.

Lessons/learnings

Requests/asks

Solutions/solves

Agreement/alignments

It definitely sounds weird if you don't spend a lot of time in that world. It's like they replace the actual noun forms with an oddly cased verb form, i.e., nominalization.

Oh, one of my most hated:

Thoughts/ideations

Jeez...

[AlchemistCamp]

I’m a native English speaker too, and my immediate reaction when hearing another native speaker say “learnings” is to think they’re an idiot. I know they might be a non-idiot who just happens to talk that way so I try herd not to judge.

Still, the bottom line is that making nouns of verbs for words for which more commonly used nouns already exist makes a poor impression on many speakers.

[j4yav]

I'm a native English speaker and it sounds less sophisticated to me. Something a middle management drone somewhere would say.

[pmontra]

Apparently it's a 21st century thing https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/learnings

[danielvaughn]

I'm a native English speaker and I agree, though it could be a regional/cultural thing. It sounds pretty odd to me.

[teaearlgraycold]

Native English speaker - I refuse to use "learnings". It's a ridiculous office-speak word.

[PaulStatezny]

Same – just like "asks". "Here's the ask" versus "here's the request".

[dartos]

Native English speaker.

I don’t think they got replaced. Colloquially they mean the same thing.

Maybe learnings sounds a little more casual and lessons more academic or formal.

[cmrdporcupine]

Learnings is corporate slang. Invented in the last couple decades by marketing types.

Lessons is since the 13th century.

[doctor_eval]

I’m a native English speaker and don’t use the phrase, but I’ve always thought that a lesson is something taught, but a learning is something learned. The former does not always imply the latter.

[ojbyrne]

As a native English speaker, in my opinion it's incredibly pretentious.

[jonsson101]

Thanks for your feedback on the title of my article. English is not my first language, and in my native tongue, the distinction between “learnings” and “lessons” isn’t as pronounced in this type of context. I appreciate the nuanced perspective and will probably update my title . My main goal is to share the experiences we’ve gathered over the years, and I hope that the essence of our journey with Kubernetes shines through, regardless of the terminology.

[mp05]

As others said, I'm not sure it's quite unsophisticated but you're not too far off. It's a specific jargon that comes from people I might perhaps consider unsophisticated if I'm in a bad mood, but more likely they're just happy to be politically correct in a fairly harmless manner.

I feel like it's used because "lessons" may imply judgment to some people?

[jujube3]

I think it happened when the Borat movie came out.

[niam]

I feel like the word unambiguously describes exactly what it is, which is all I can really ask for from a word.

"Lesson" by itself might connote a more concrete transmission of knowledge (like a school lesson). Which is a meaningful distinction if the goal of the article is merely to muse about lessons they've learned rather than imply that this is a lesson from the writers to the audience. "Lesson learned" could imply the same thing, but is longer to say ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I get what the comments here are saying about it sounding corporate, but I think this is a unique situation where this word actually makes sense.

[radicalbyte]

I've always assumed that "learnings" was the American English version of "lessons" in English English.

[burkaman]

I think it's more Corporate English. I've never heard anyone say it outside of a work meeting.

[lordgrenville]

People complain about this word pretty often on HN. I don't like it either but I've just come to accept it.

[youngtaff]

It’s a bloody American thing… Lessons FTW… uses less characters too

[bigstrat2003]

It's not that. I'm American and I've never heard anyone use "learnings" instead of "lessons". It has to be coming from a specific subculture, though I have no idea where.

[karlshea]

It's very much just bro corporate speak, if I heard someone use "learnings" instead of "lessons" irl they would definitely fall into the slot for a specific type of person in my head. Very LinkedIn.