Recall that Microspeak is not merely for jargon exclusive to Microsoft, but it’s jargon that you need to know to survive at Microsoft.

For most of my career at Microsoft, the term used by people who want to sound important to say that they want to delve more deeply into a topic was to drill down. Here are some citations, suitably anonymized.

Bob added a section on accessibility. We may need to drill down into specifics for each of the requirements.

We conducted a survey to determine how people use our feature. They broke down into four general categories listed here. Let’s drill down a bit further into each of these categories.

The verb phrase got nouned as drill-down, referring to the result of drilling down.

Here is the drill-down.

And it’s also an adjective, meaning “related to the act of drilling down”.

From that number, two drill-down paths exist.

The term has even gained official recognition in the Microsoft Writing Style Guide, with its own entry with guidance on proper use. Note that it approves the use of the term in the context of data analysis and discourages its metaphorical use.

drill down, drill up, drill through

It’s OK to use drill down, drill up, and drill through in content about data and the reports generated from them.

Two words as a verb. Hyphenate drill-down and drill-up as adjectives. Note that drillthrough as a noun or an adjective is one word, no hyphen.

Examples

If you have grouped items in your PivotTable, you can drill down on a group name. Then, you can drill back up to analyze summary data.

Using drill-down and drill-up actions, you can expand and collapse sections within a report to find the data that interests you the most.

If you add the ability to drill through on an existing mining model, the model must be reprocessed before you can drill through to the data.

Use a drillthrough query to retrieve details from the underlying cases or structure data. Drillthrough is useful if you want to see additional details from the case data.

Don’t use to mean following a path (such as folders) or giving something further examination.

Example

Microsoft MVPs joined an in-depth discussion about Azure security management solutions.

The anti-guidance helpfully gives us a definition of drill down as Microspeak: “To give something further examination.”

All of these usages of drill down (including the metaphorical ones) are still in wide use, but around the year 2020 or 2021, I encountered a new term that means roughly the same thing, but much more jargony.

I’m referring to double-click, which was covered by The Wall Street Journal and amplified by the Language Log in 2024.

As far as I can tell, double-click means about the same thing as drill down, but in a more jargony, cringy way. Finding citations for this use is more difficult because it appears to be primarily used in speech and not writing. I guess everyone is too embarrassed to write it in a document.

There are currently no resources devoted to designing a tutorial. Once we have resources, we can double-click on the journey for how users can find it.

Person 1: If the user clicks the button, we will take them to a settings page where they can enable their widgets.

Person 2: I want to double-click on this experience. Why does the user need to explicitly enable their widgets? Is there a path where we can enable them by default?

I wish people would stop using the term double-click in this way. It bothers me about as much as the nounified ask.