Anita Briggs, of Hopkinton, Mass., writes: “The term takeaway — as in, ‘Here’s the takeaway from this information’ — is increasingly common. Do you have an opinion on it?”
Anita, I first heard takeaway in this sense circa 1999, when my Atlantic colleague (and now fellow substacker) James Fallows spent six months at Microsoft on a software-design team that was upgrading Word to make it more writer-friendly. Jim has always had an ear for new and interesting language, and when I saw him at about that time, he asked me pretty much the same question you just did. He reported that key takeaway was a phrase being bandied about in Microsoft meetings. I think we both made ironic faces, as in, Good grief, what are the tech people doing to our language?
So I became attuned to key takeaway at that point and have had it on my radar ever since. (For research purposes, I had to use that phrase rather than the word takeaway alone, because takeaway meals and other takeaways also exist.) Key takeaway has definitely become increasingly common, and that’s not just an opinion: I searched the NOW Corpus on the website English Corpora for usages over time. This impressive database shows 0 usages in online U.S. publications in 2000, 13 in 2012, 22 in 2016, and 315 in 2020. The number dropped a bit, to 223, in 2024.
My opinion about takeaway? I suppose it’s not too different from what I thought in 1999, except that I have to accept the word now crops up in contexts ranging from nbcsports.com to psychologytoday.com to hindu.com. It still sounds jargonish to me, and I’d be dismayed if, say, a member of the clergy told their congregation that the “key takeaways” from their latest sermon were thus-and-such. Today the word suits some registers but not all.
Those of us who are old-school need to bear in mind that language changes. We don’t need to use terminology that we dislike, but as for what others say or write … well, isn’t that what tolerance — a virtue that seems to be in considerably greater demand than supply these days — is all about?
I thought the right term was “take home”.
Thank you so much for including the link to "registers," which provided me several wonderful hours of burrowing into not only "registers," but "pragmatics," "motherese," "phatic communion," and "code-switching!"