Archives for category: jargon

Useful consciousness

3 April 2011 //
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In this morning’s paper there was a story about the rupture of the fuselage on a Southwest Airline 737-300 jet.

An aviation expert is quoted as saying that, in such circumstances, “At an altitude above 34,000 feet, the Southwest pilots would have had only 10 to 20 seconds of ‘useful consciousness’ to get their oxygen masks on or pass out.”

No doubt this “useful consciousness” is expert language, even jargon of the industry, but it strikes us non-experts as odd indeed. And then (it struck me, at least) as hilarious.

Of course, the expert, John Gadzinski, is talking about reaction time that a pilot would have to take crucial action. “The higher you are,” he goes on, “the less useful consciousness time you have.”

Passengers, presumably, would have just as little time to secure their oxygen masks, and one witness recounts some passengers fumbling and falling in their frantic haste to secure oxygen.

Higher Consciousness

It would be good to cultivate useful consciousness, even if we can't all attain the Higher Consciousness of the wise.

But the language is hilarious, I mean, because taken out of this strict expert context, and tucked into an everyday sphere of discourse, it might suggest that most of us are flying most of the time with little “useful consciousness.” We’re flying by the seat of our pants, perhaps. We’re not straightening up and flying right. We’re on autopilot.

What do we do in fact with this incredible gift, this blessing, of consciousness? How do we develop it, pursue it, improve on it? Do we see the world in its freshness and, yes, fresh hilarity? Or do we plod along in the ruts, in the ox carts (not airplanes) of our daily habits?

I don’t mean here to provide psychological counseling. (Who am I to suggest direction?) But to say that language reflects our habits of consciousness, and unconsciousness. (Some would say creates these habits.) And that changing our language may change our lives. Being more conscious of how we use what we use every day (language) can make a qualitative difference.

Take an obvious example. We all know people whose every other word seems to be the f word. Now if they could cut their vulgarity in half, and then replace that half with words and phrases more appropriate, or more exact, even if they are measures of the anger and frustration the speakers may be feeling, this new verbiage may reflect / create changes in the life. They will begin feeling, and being perceived as, not quite so angry, marginal, out of the loop.

Or, another example, take an engineer who, proud of his expertise, her mastery of arcane lore, has no idea when he speaks to laymen and press that he’s using insider language. Every other word is not a swear word but a tech word, and he baffles us as much as the angry, obscene speaker may.

In less dramatic instances, consider just about any business brochure or website you come across. If it’s not full of jargon, it uses stale language, the hard crusts of yesterday’s banquets. Old scraps that should’ve been thrown out with the garbage long ago.

A local academic, who advises watershed districts (one of my clients is the Lower Minnesota River Watershed District), has set up a Watershed Game workshop in which participants “learn how their choices can prevent adverse impacts.”

Oh my, my, my. Save us from the adverse impacts of such game playing! From the dents in the head we’re sure to receive from such bruising jargon! How can someone who talks like this, expert as he may be, lead games? He has forgotten how to play with language, for sure, and language creates, if it doesn’t just reflect, our reality.

Well, you say, business is business, and we’re in the business of selling, not making bread or art. People care only what you say, not how you say it.

Which is true enough, at the surface anyway.

But don’t we all want to sell — and buy — something fresh and new? No matter if it’s a commodity, or a highly rare or technical service, we want the sizzle with the steak. And cliches don’t sizzle. Jargon doesn’t compel with its aroma. It beats us into submission, into the hematomas of the everyday workday. Yes, sure, it adversely impacts us, rendering us if not dead then on life support!

Useful consciousness, at last. Isn’t that what we’re after in business as in life?

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Categories discourse, jargon

Think outside the box: really outside the box!

2 March 2011 //
0
microshelter

Derek Diedreksen's Gypsy Junker invites you to think outside the box!

Well, we’re all so busy thinking outside the box these days — that’s the exhortation, isn’t it? — that we fail to see the box we’re trapped in. The box of cliches, jargon, obscure Latinisms, and boxed-in thinking in general.

Seems like a loony in Massachusetts has set about to right this problem — in a nouveau-Thoreauvian way.

In Walden, Thoreau opined that a man might live with dignity in a house the size of a railroad storage box, the kind he saw beside the tracks at Walden Pond in Concord, Mass, the kind that held RR supplies, I suppose. Thoreau was keeping his tongue in cheek, as usual. He was full of wit and banter about the follies of his fellow man, whose misfortune it was, he asserted, to be trundling down life’s road with his house and all his possessions on his back.

We don’t have to be a follower of Thoreau or know much about him to see that he makes some kind of paradoxical sense at least. (Do you think he’d have many followers on LinkedIn or friends on Facebook, now that it’s the popular thing to do, the boxy kind of thing we seem to seek?) We stress quantity so much, that is, that we forget about quality. Qualify of life, if you will. (Argh, I hate that phrase!) Or quality of time and space to inhabit and explore.

A recent New York Times article shows that Thoreau has a follower and friend in contemporary Stoughton, Massachusetts, a fellow named Derek Diedreksen who is into thinking outside the box. You see, he has been constructing in the back yard of his modest two-bedroom house a series of “micro-shelters” that he calls the Gypsy Junker, the Hickshaw, and the Boxy Lady. Like Thoreau with his cabin, Diedreksen has made his constructions out of materials he’s scavenged or bought on the cheap. Each has cost him less than $200. (In Walden’s first chapter, “Economy,” Thoreau lays out his expenses for boards, nails, mortar, etc. penny by penny.)

Of the Gypsy Junker, the largest of the three structures, Diedreksen says, “Originally, it was going to be a place to brainstorm for my book [about the micro-structures] and my designs. … There’s no better place than inside someplace that is unconventional and bizarre. It helps you think outside the box instead of sitting in some white-walled room.”

So there you have it. If you really want to think outside the box, get thee to a micro-structure if not a nunnery. All that breathing the shallow air of white-walled rooms will do you in. Guaranteed!

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Categories creativity, jargon, structure

Savvy, humble, and willing to commit

28 February 2011 //
0

This is sad, friends, and true. I’m at an age where I read the obits for pleasure. (Thank God it was them, not me.) And look at the job ads, too, with wonder.

This morning I ran across one that, like so many others, seems to have been written by a robot.

Among other impossibilities, it called for an account executive who was “savvy, humble, and willing to commit.”

Isn’t this like asking for a 40-year-old virgin?

If you’re savvy, friend, you’re not going to be particularly humble.

And if you’re humble, you won’t be cunning and savvy.

That’s the nature of the beast.

But this bit of linguistic legerdemain is pretty common. It’s a bit you can find in all kinds of ads that ask for unique individuals who can think outside the box (including the box of cliches) — and be 100% team players (another cliche).

humble pie chart

We need to remind ourselves how humble we must be!

In the world of thinking outside the box, we don’t say we’ll think outside the box.

In the world of team playing, we do. (We say rah! rah! rah!)

So which box do they want — creative thinking or conformity?

And how far are they willing to accommodate really new ideas?

(Rodney King, beaten by the cops, might say, “Why can’t we all just get along?” And those who are beaten and cowed by the bosses might ask the same.)

I’m not making an argument for cat fights and sabotage. Rather, I’m suggesting that real creativity may come at the price of real 100% collaboration not to mention groupthink.

How can we have it both ways?

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Categories creativity, jargon

Going viral: must we?

27 January 2011 //
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It’s the sheer unrelenting uninventiveness of jargon that gets me.

The way a new word or phrase sweeps through society like a tsunami or, to use an example, “goes viral.”

A closer examination of these bits of jargon reveals metaphors that are born one day and, like flies, die that same day, as dead metaphors, though they live on and are used.

So, then, “going viral.”

A YouTube post can go viral when everyone clicks on the Internet site.

A phrase itself, like “going viral,” can go viral when everyone, suddenly, starts seeing it in print. (Do we read print anymore? Print not produced by texting?)

Yes, the metaphor, originally striking and original, dies almost immediately, becomes a dead metaphor, for few people recognize it any more as a metaphor, a simile or comparison. It’s just words, dead words, dead flies, detritus that piles up and connects us to each other in a kind of disease or diseased network.

If a bit of language, or a video, goes viral, isn’t it by definition virulent? Doesn’t it, like a virus, have the power to spread rapidly — but also to infect?

If we are infected by this virus, then aren’t we too sick?

And if we use the phrase or video, aren’t we spreading the disease?

We don’t have to be high priests of language, purists, “gloomy grammarian in …  golden gowns” (thanks, Wallace Stevens), to realize that unconscious use of language makes us susceptible to all sorts of diseases. We spread the germs. We don’t realize we’re ailing. We don’t realize we’re being overtaken by these germs, even as we do their bidding, willy-nilly, the way an HIV-positive person may succumb to the virus.

If we must go viral, can we develop some consciousness of our predicament?

So that we don’t spread the jargon, the cliches, the disease indiscriminately?

(For a good example of viral hype, see BuzzFeed, the kind of contemptible tripe we’re all too used to in the infotainment sphere. For a quick consideration of how jargon corrupts, see “What Is Your Gibberish Component?”)

Categories discourse, jargon

What’s wrong with jargon?

5 January 2011 //
0

Jargon has always seemed to me a pernicious habit. Yes, it establishes people in a language club, where they can talk, and think, alike. And where they enjoy a certain common comfort.

But you see, right away, what the problem is.

If everybody is talking the same way, and thinking the same way, no one is saying, or thinking, anything different. They will have an awful hard time establishing differences when that’s necessary.

Rain Clouds

It's never a sunny day when "cloud-based solutions" and other jargon darken the sky!

If you have a product or service you’re trying to differentiate, you can’t do so by using jargon — mobtalk and gobbledygook.

Like you, I receive lots of unsolicited emails, and I look at some of them. One recent message, offering Search Engine Optimization for my web site, suggested the vendor offered “cloud-based solutions.”

I inquired if that meant they made rain?

They answered, politely, that “cloud-based solutions” meant that “all scanning and data processing is performed on our servers, i.e., Internet-based computing.”

Now that the explanation was made, I felt we had come down from the clouds and established our feet once more on solid ground. Whew! I was beginning to feel dizzy — and worry that I had lost my grip on the earth.

I may not be exactly the technical audience they had in mind, these good SEO people, when they tried to impress me with “cloud-based solutions.” But I’ve been around the block a few times and heard all I want to hear of “solutions” (let’s give solids and gases, not to mention peace, a chance, shall we?).

If the reader doesn’t understand your jargon, he certainly won’t be responding to it the way you might want him to!

Categories jargon