[Rant] - Please stop calling the dog a "Pupper" at Work

D-O-G: The Three-Letter Word Corporate Forgot

There’s a quiet, collective cringe happening across corporate offices today, and it isn’t in the pitch decks or financial reports. It’s happening in Slack channels, where middle managers with master’s degrees are asking fully grown adults to give their 'puppers extra snuggles' this weekend. Somewhere down the line, office culture lost its mind and started reading like a comment section on a 2018 dog meme.

During a recent Fortune 500 presentation, a 52-year-old senior manager paused his deck to show a picture of his dog, calling it a sweet little pupper. The dog is seven years old and weighs 80 pounds. It’s not a pupper; it’s a full-grown animal.

Still, this baby talk has somehow snuck into everyday office conversations. Words like 'floofer' and 'boop' aren't just for internet memes anymore, even experienced project managers use them instead of having a real personality. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-pet. Plenty of us love our dogs, happily blow our hard earned cash on their toys, and love having them around. That’s totally normal. What’s weird is completely dropping your adult vocabulary the second a pet gets mentioned in a work meeting.

There’s a pretty huge middle ground between talking like a toddler and writing like Charles Dickens. Nobody is asking for team emails to sound like 19th-century love letters: 'Dearest colleagues, I do hope your hounds find themselves in elevated spirits today.

D-O-G. It is three letters. It sits right there in the middle of the keyboard.

When people swap normal words for cutesy internet slang, it doesn’t make the office feel friendly, it just feels absurd. Somewhere between work, memes, and corporate attempts to be ‘relatable,’ adults somehow forgot how to talk like adults.

You can be warm, approachable, and love dogs without losing your mind every time one shows up on a Zoom call. It’s time to drop the ‘puppers’ and start talking like grown-ups again.