You Say

Recently, large-scale layoffs at Microsoft have been the talk of the town, mainly because they've done quite a bit to erode people's confidence in the direction of the economy. The Trump Administration's haphazard tariff proclamations are unlikely to restore the high-wage jobs that are being shed, because they're not going overseas; they're simply being swept aside to make room for new technology.

When I was laid off from Microsoft just over six years ago, that's how I described it; I had been laid off from Microsoft. But now, a different way of talking about these things has emerged, with people referring to themselves as having been impacted by the layoffs.

I find it an interesting wording, because it makes the layoffs come across as a separate thing from what's actually happening to people. The layoff moves from an effect to a cause. And the loss of jobs is merely one of the effects of that cause. Whether it softens the blow, or this is simply people mirroring the way the company itself describes the events in question, I don't know. But I suspect that if this trend continues, it's going to lead to a change in the way people see both themselves and their jobs/careers.

And perhaps that's the point. While a lot of corporation-speak tends to strike me as essentially emergent, perhaps this particular turn of phrase is a matter of design. Language does, after all, shape the way people look at the world around them.