On the chat today I mentioned that I recently visited an office where the new CEO changed their stagnant titles to very interestsing ones, such as "strategist" and "Chief of Staff." He wanted to change the Human Resources person's title to Evangelist because it emphasizes advocacy. However, he got pushback because of the religious meaning. Etymology.com says it comes from:
quote:
Late Latin evangelista, from Greek euangelistes "preacher of the gospel," literally "bringer of good news," from euangelizesthai "bring good news," from eu- "good" (see eu-) + angellein "announce," from angelos "messenger" (see angel).
Do you only consider evangelist to have a religious meaning?
[Corrected typo in title of this thread]This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kalleh,
d. transf. A zealous advocate of a cause or promulgator of a doctrine.
1978 P. Howard Weasel Words xxi. 90 It makes sense to say that the French Revolution found its evangelist in Rousseau; that Mary Whitehouse is the evangelist of cleaning up television. 1988 Daily Tel. 20 Apr. 10/3 Cleese appears an unlikely evangelist for the shop assistants, double-glazing salesmen and managing directors of this world.
As (I believe) I said in the chat, evangelist is much used in Silicon Valley as a title (and it is not for HR personal). This usage goes back at least to the late eighties.An evangelist is basically like a PR rep on steroids. They go around praising some product to the faithful and the ignorant. As with most polysemous words, context is usually enough to disambiguate.
Yes, I agree about context. However, sometimes the definition can be nebulous, regardless of the context - probably not with the title of "Evangelist" in a business.
