Talk:Proactive

This word has been going around my office a lot lately; the managers like to use it every chance they get to sound intelligent and encourage people to work harder or work "proactively". Obviously I started to get suspicious of the original meaning. Just goes to show, maybe you should be more sure of the meaning before you decide to choose your new favorite word lol.


 * Simpsons reference lol —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sjalvastefan (talk • contribs) 19:34, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

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I assume that dates assigned to new words by reputable dictionaries are backed up by checkable citations. By implication, Frankl cannot be the coiner of the word if he first used it in print in 1946 unless it can be shown that he was also the first person to use it in 1930 or 1933 (for instance, in a private letter).
 * The online OED has a citation from 1933, from a psychological journal. It is not by Frankl, but by Whiteley and Blankfort. (Their usage is proactive inhibition, an inhibition resulting from a prior cause, as opposed to the normal Freudian inhibition from a later cause.) He therefore neither coined the word, nor brought it into common usage (which was much later). This is therefore tendentious and inaccurate.


 * Articles on words should be at Wiktionary anyway. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:04, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

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Ira Tessier: Actually the Wikipedia text on Proactive did not attribute the origin of the word to Frankl as claimed by PMAnderson. In his research, Alain Paul Martin gave credit to Frankl for his seminal and widely popular book "Man's Search for Meaning" which brought the word to a wider public audience in the post WWII era. Thus, the issue raised by PMAnderson was helpful to clarify the first paragraph as I have done. But his inference that the text was tendentious and inaccurate is, in my humble opinion, incorrect. The Wikipedia document on Proactive is currently the most comprehensive entry on the subject in the Web. Deleting it would be a disservice to the large number of individuals and organizations who use the word without understanding its vast power of connotation. by Ira Tessier IraTessier (talk) 01:00, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Ira Tessier: In reading the discussion about Proactivity and Proactive Behavior, I have further noticed Martin's comments: "the restriction of meaning of proactive as contrary of reactive is indeed mistakenly well entrenched in the real world". He used a quick test that returned over a million pages when Google searching for "proactive" AND "reactive". Martin believes this reflects "a real misunderstanding of the word proactive. This is another reason to keep the Wikipedia entry and to keep it current by enriching the discussion. Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Proactivity_(Proactive_behavior). IraTessier (talk) 01:16, 15 February 2009 (UTC)