Posts Tagged 'Weasel words'

Softening the impact

Published August 24, 2011 Research , Words Leave a Comment
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HS2: I'm just saying, it could happen

Reading my copy of Private Eye this week, I was interested in a letter (page 13) from Robin Stummer, who was complaining about the government’s feasibility study into HS2, the new high-speed rail line between London and Birmingham – and especially the use of the weasel phrase “physical impact” to describe what will happen to 300 or so listed buildings, conservation areas and woodlands along the route. Here’s an example from the report, which warns us that building HS2 will include:

Adverse physical impacts on two Scheduled Monuments, 14 Grade II listed buildings and 3 Grade II* Registered parks and gardens within the physical impact corridor.

Imagine a man with a clipboard and a peaked hat saying it. I like trains, but I like them less when I read documents like this.

I quote newfound talknormalist Optymystic, commenting to an article about Talk Normal:

Impacts is used as a substitute for causes, influences, bears upon, determines, affects, all of which provide precise ways of expressing the sense clearly, by contrast with which “impacts” is vague.

He could have included stronger words such as decreases or destroys, but he makes a good point: it’s part of a flattening of the language that seems to be assisting in the flattening of listed buildings. You can’t tell what an adverse physical impact is, because it could be anything from having a train tootling by just outside your moat to having one whizzing up your Grade II listed hallway – maybe that’s what they mean by an impact corridor.

“Impact” is a technocratic weasel word that avoids having to explain what the result of the impact is, which is precisely what we need to know. It’s also a successful weasel word, twice as popular as it was 10 years ago:

“Impacts” usually means something bad: rule of thumb from Factiva is that there are two admitted negative impacts in the press for every one described as positive; with the majority left unqualified so that we have to work out for ourselves what people are carefully trying not to tell us.

I’m guessing that the unqualified uses of the word are, in the main, bad news avoided to make sure we don’t get too upset. After all, impact is not an efficient word when used to deliver happiness: no one tells you that you’ve won the lottery by announcing that it will “impact your ability to pay the rent”. But, if I’m working for you and I tell you that creating silly pictures of trains for Talk Normal will “impact my ability to meet your deadline”, then take it from me: I’m going to be late.

The buck does not stop here

Published August 8, 2011 Links , Research , Uncategorized , Words 1 Comment
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No one likes a blame culture. Especially when you’re the one taking the blame.

While News International flip-flops its way through the phone hacking palaver – offering various explanations of exactly what it was doing, who did it, and whether the evidence has been successfully deleted – one of the few things that most people agreed was adroit was Rupert’s personal apology (see right). We remember it because it has the word sorry at the top. You can argue that he is only sorry that they got caught, but you can’t dismiss the power of the apology.

Of course, it’s one thing to ask your advertising agency to write “sorry” on a piece of paper, it’s quite another to say it out loud. That’s why James Murdoch used a beautiful weasel phrase to describe the closure of the News of the World and any illegal phone hacking. Having got his sorrys out of the way at 3:30, phone hacking and its consequences quickly became a matter of great regret, so that he can get into the technical stuff instead:

Elsewhere in the scandal, Yates of the Yard went further. His impersonal regret was extreme:

Antitalknormalists use the Matter of Regret (MoR) when they are nominally in charge and bad things happen. They want to look concerned, just like ordinary people, while subtly emphasising their lack of individual responsibility. They want to stay on the outside, sadly shaking their regretful heads and tutting ritualistically, going along with the crowd.  This is especially the case when the crowd wants that head on a plate.

Transforming your apology or blame into a generic MoR means you keep a career-maintaining distance from the problem. It skips over who’s to blame and why it happened.

In the UK the MoR is also such a dull phrase as to be handily unreportable in most cases, because it provides no insight beyond the obvious: it’s like saying that something made you unhappy because it is sad. It has been quoted in stories in the UK papers more than 10 times in a month only twice – probably because if that’s the best quote in a story, it’s probably not much of a story. It was most popular in September 2010, when it was a matter of regret for the boss of Waterstones that demonstrators stopped Tony Blair doing a business-boosting book signing tour in his shops. That’s until July 2011 when, as we have seen, many of the people involved in phone hacking news stories were fond of using the phrase. Go figure.

MoRs imply a devolved responsibility that everyone can share but no one takes, and so they transform apology into a generic blanket of mild sadness. MoRs sit in the News International tactical toolbox alongside matters of profit and matters of political influence, ready to be used when they really want to say “don’t blame us”.

Cross with Crossrail

Published May 11, 2011 Interviews , Words 2 Comments
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What a Crossrail station will look like. Memo to architects: if you leave your car there in East London, don't expect to see it when you get back

I’m having a bit of a Talknormalish to-do at the moment with Crossrail, or at least one of its contractors. The people I speak to tell me they are listening, though we all know they’re just tolerating me until I go away. If you’ve tried to complain to anyone with a complaints process recently, you know what I mean.

It’s about what we think consultation means, and what they know it means.

To recap: I live in a flat that’s facing the Olympic site for London 2012. As you can imagine, I’m accustomed to construction noise by now.

From time to time someone pushes a leaflet through the letterbox which tells me the builders are going to lower the street outside my door by two metres (this actually happened), or turn off the sun for the weekend, or put up a giant animatronic statue of Lord Coe.

The contractors are careful to phrase the leaflets in town planning jargon so you actually know less when you finished than when you began. They put a badly-drawn map on the back that looks like it was printed with a potato.

This is what is known in the construction business as consultation. Originally from the word consult: to seek advice, or consider, in this context it means telling us what they’ve already decided to do, and have often already started. It’s like going for a consultation with the doctor and discovering that he already sawed your leg off in the waiting room.

It’s all change in Stratford because, as well as the Olympics, we’re getting Crossrail – a new railway to take some Londoners left to right, and others right to left. It will be finished in 2017, but the contractors need to put this bit of Crossrail in now or else they’ll have to dig the Olympics up again as soon as it’s finished; and by that time they’ll have planted flowers for the tourists.

Crossrail has decided to extend its work to the evening: between the hours of 0800 and 2200 Monday to Friday, and on Saturdays too. They’re do this with a machine that the leaflet calls a piling rig, which is a giant BANG BANG BANG hammer which BANG BANG BANG thumps metal things BANG BANG BANG repeatedly until your KABOOM head explodes. I know this, because they started doing the work the week before they consulted us about it.

I can’t wait to spend the long summer evenings relaxing while I listen to it in action, mixed only with the background noise of tired babies crying.

So, I complained to the consultation number on the letter, and a liaison person called me back. It went like this:

Me: Why weren’t any of us consulted about the extended hours?

Her: We got permission from the Newham Borough Council. We have the obligation to consult you by sending out the letter to say whats happening.

Me: That’s not a consultation then.

Her: We’re just the contractor.

Me: Still not a consultation though.

Her: Crossrail organised the consultation.

Me: When?

Her: Before the Crossrail bill went through parliament*.

Me: But your leaflet doesn’t even explain what’s happening.

Her: What do you mean?

Me: It’s in jargon. Half the people in Newham have English as a second language**. They don’t know what bored piling to form the abutments for the bridge is, so they can’t understand what you’re telling them.

Her: We don’t write the final leaflet. We’re just the contractor.

Me: (overexcited) And you wrote that the work would start at 0800 and finish at 2200, but then that there are one hour startup and shutdown periods, so that means the work will actually take place between 0700 and 2300.

Her: (bored now) I see.

Me: (frothing) And you say that you will keep noisy work to a minimum on Saturdays and in the evenings.

Her: (frosty) Yes.

Me: (triumphant) Ha! But that just means that you will be doing noisy work on Saturdays and in the evenings. This is supposed to be information, you’re not meant to be twisting the truth to make yourselves sound nice.

At this point she offered to ask the director of jargon dissemination (not his real job title) to call me so I can give him the benefit of my irritating advice on his choice of words. I’ll keep you in touch, but I won’t hold my breath.

* To be fair, this consultation did take place. Eight years ago.

** I’m exaggerating here. It’s 47 per cent.

Role players

Published September 3, 2010 Pictures , Research , Uncategorized , Words 6 Comments
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On the evidence of this headline, my job is half way to being a soap opera

I was scanning the comments to this excellent blog post about how our jobs are getting worse. One of the commenters asked: “When did a job become a ‘role’?”

My guess is, about the time that we started to think of ourselves as the romantic leads in a heroic work-based melodrama, which is about when we started to treat CEOs as philosophers and action heroes rather than businesspeople. Graduating from a job to a role implies we are acting the part rather than just doing something. We’re important enough to have an image.

As in any soap opera, in business not all roles are equal. Some hams overact to get attention. For example, a dedicated Talknormalist passed me details of Steve Lundin at BIGFrontier (“Our event archives provide a walk through the wild west days of Chicago’s burgeoning technology scene”), who is apparently the company’s Chief Hunter and Gatherer.

He’s certainly playing a role. You might have an opinion as to what that role is; I’ll let you come up with your own description.

Research on Factiva shows that, in UK work-related press articles, the roles-to-jobs ratio changed dramatically between 2001 and 2007. In 2001 there were about 10 jobs for every role. In 2007, the number of roles peaked: there were only four jobs per role in the press. Then, when the recession hit, the ratio declined to seven jobs per role. The higher this graph went, the more we were writing about roles:

Compare the shape of the graph with the Office of National Statistics estimates of UK employment and UK vacancies during the same period:

Best to be cautious when drawing a conclusion from this, because more or less every economic graph goes up between 2001 and 2007 and then goes off a cliff. But I’d guess that, when everything seemed exciting and full of promise, we fantasised (and were told) we had an important role. When we were fired, it was from our meaningless jobs.

Core value judgement

Published June 7, 2010 Research , Words Leave a Comment
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Obviously I looked younger in those days

I know the exact moment I decided to give up playing rugby. I was being carried off the pitch on a stretcher with blood pouring out of my head, and one of the prop forwards patted me on the leg and said, “Well, Tim, looks like your journalism days are over”.

Whether or not you find this joke funny probably depends on whether you think rugby is a noble pursuit for tough people or 80 minutes of institutionalised assault. To tip public perception towards nobility and away from criminality, the English Rugby Football Union has just done what the establishment usually does in these cases: made a big statue.

At least when the Victorians did this, they usually had the subtlety to try and hide their hidden agenda. The RFU, with all the subtlety of a prop forward, decided to call the latest addition to the Twickenham furniture the Core Values sculpture. Why now? I looked it up: “Two years ago the RFU put together a task group to run an extensive consultation exercise. The Core Values project – the first time a sport has set out to define its value system in formal terms – identified the following principles…”

Speaking as a big fan of Rugby Union, it has always had hypocrisy as one of its unspoken core values. The game was proudly amateur when my dad played, and you were banned if you were even suspected of taking money to play – so his club secretly stuffed money in his boot instead.

There have been a lot of people bragging about their core values recently: companies in the US and UK are about three times as likely to claim in their press releases that they have core values as they were in 2000, as the graphs below show.

But where, I thought, are we most likely to find an increase in these core values? I thought it might be good to look for the phrase in press releases on military procurement. Defence contractors discovered many more core values during the period between 2003 and 2006 – which is an improvement on the 1990s, when they didn’t mention core values at all. I shaded the area during which BAE Systems was investigated over accusations of corruption (In 2010 it admitted false accounting and, in a settlement, agreed to pay £257m criminal fines to the US and £30m to the UK – but the company denies bribery).

Banks, however, had a core value growth peak much earlier. This time I shaded a period which covers the Senate Committee of Finance’s investigation into Enron and the complicity of banks in the creative accountancy that took place.

But the real stars of the core values show are in the securities business. They didn’t make much noise about core values in the past: again, not a single mention of the phrase in the early 1990s that I could find. But they are making up for it now. You are now about six times as likely to read a securities industry press release that mentions core values as you were in 2000.  I’m not going to insult you by pointing out which relevant period I’ve highlighted in the final graph:

Of course, my simple measurement doesn’t explore what those core values might be. A few weeks ago I spoke to  Dr Doug Hirschhorn, who is one of the top trader coaches in the world. I asked his what the values of his trainees are: “These people get paid an obscene amount of money. They are not curing cancer or creating new ways to feed people. It draws the sort of people attracted to sensation-seeking,” he said.

The sensation-seeking search for obscene personal wealth is a core value, I guess. I’m also guessing that it’s not the core value mentioned in those press releases.

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Shooting the messengers

Published May 18, 2010 Research , Words 2 Comments
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A firing squad: sometimes it's not so much about who to to shoot, as who to save

Having been distracted by a research project that was like a giant, academic version of Talk Normal, I’m even more convinced of the power of the dark forces that would undermine our work. On the other hand, I’m less certain who the dark forces are.

It’s always easy to blame PR companies and their often laughable press releases for the pain of irritating jargon. In the UK, at least, that’s not the end of the story.

Let me show you why: I did some research which measured the frequency of the top seven jargon phrases identified in David Meerman Scott’s Gobbledygook Manifesto in 2006, which I already used as the source to find the worst press release in history. I looked at the frequency of these seven jargon phrases since 1990. While the use of jargon has increased dramatically – especially during the 1990s – the frequency of the jargon phrases was consistently approximately equal in newspapers and press releases in the UK.

So in the UK, on this (admittedly limited) evidence, jargon’s not just a PR company problem.

In the graph below, each blob maps the relative frequency of a jargon phrase in one year. If it’s on the diagonal line, it appears equally frequently in newspapers and press releases in that year.

Below the diagonal line, and the phrase is more frequent in press releases. Above it, and it’s more more frequent in the press. I used only major news sources and newswires, not geeky jargon-filled magazines.

As an aside, I did a similar plot for US sources, and the same jargon phrases are between 10 and 20 times more frequent in US press releases as they are in US news; and US news has much less jargon than UK news. So the conclusion that I draw is that, if a journalist’s job is partly about weeding out jargon from its raw material, American journalists are doing a good job and British journalists are doing a rubbish one.

It’s called a holiday

Published April 29, 2010 Research , Words Leave a Comment
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Scarborough

Scarborough: a commitment to integrating modern architecture that is perhaps most reminiscent of Barcelona.

Now that most people are mostly back in a country that mostly matches the one on their plane ticket, it’s time to strike an optimistic note about one other thing that didn’t fly last week: the attempt by holiday operator Thomson to popularise the phrase “awaycation” to describe a holiday overseas.

Thanks to Will Randall for showing me the press release, based on a survey by Opinion Matters. It needed someone to point it out to me, because afterwards I could count only four publications that wrote about it – and one of them only printed the word to make fun of it.

The awaycation is the latest shot in marketing’s tedious Buzzword Wars. Imagine, if you will, a group of dedicated marketers and PR people in early 2008, huddled into a meeting room, desperately trying to make the prospect of a week in Scarborough seem attractive to people who would prefer to take their leisure in Ibiza or Florida.

There’s a reason why we choose not to go on holiday to the same places that our parents visited. It’s broadly speaking because, compared to most popular destinations in the world, a British holiday is what travel experts call a bit crap. But call your holiday a “staycation” and you’re not just eating overpriced jumbo haddock and chips while watching the drizzle, you’re part of a global economic trend. Also, it gives the travel section something to write about that isn’t holiday companies going down the tubes or how you’re only getting one Euro per Pound.

The tedious buzzword magic worked for the staycation marketers – seven uses of the word before January 2008, more than 4,000 since then –  so in 2010 Thomson, which owns 77 planes and even bought a Boeing 787, needed to work the same magic by describing something like a staycation which involves getting on a flight. Just don’t call it something boringly descriptive like a holiday abroad. It’s much better than that, it’s an awaycation!

Sigh.

This tedious rebirthing isn’t new, because there are so many reasons beyond inspiration-free desperation for marketers to do it. It might just be the self-importance that turns a personnel department into human resources. It might be a way to do an about-turn without making it look like you were wrong, which turns outsourcing into insourcing, rightsourcing or even upsourcing.

Or, sadly, it might be our need to see every event in our lives as a jolly project with a special name and a happy ending. Losing your job has always been a pain for you and an opportunity for buzzword manufacturers. In vogue at the moment: you’re apparently re-careering.

If you have expertise in inventing pointless words for marketing purposes but currently find yourself unavoidably re-careering, perhaps a job in an expanded Ministry of Euphemisms for Bad Things is on the cards. On the evidence of this election, trying to pretend that it’s OK really is one part of the public sector that has continued to expand in the recession. If we’re going to fight the Buzzword Wars, our troops need to have the right euphemisms. Sorry, I meant they need to be optimally resourced with appropriately context-sensitive descriptors. These meaningless government phrases don’t invent themselves, you know.

A quick search shows that even the mildly silly “re-careering” had a better run in the press than “awaycation” has, so far at least. I find this encouraging: we have discovered that it is possible to come up with a marketing buzzword that’s so obviously rubbish that everyone simply ignores it, like a bad smell.

The spade nomenclature differential dynamic

Published March 25, 2010 Pictures , Words Leave a Comment
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So I’m walking through Waterloo station and I see this billboard claiming  jargon-free insurance policies. Usually I don’t write about advertising because most of it irritates me; though I did like the little puppets that shout “C’mon!” But this billboard was right on my metaphorical platform.

I thought it would be worth testing whether spades really are being called spades at the moment, so I did a Phillips Weasel Index search using the whole world’s published articles about everything since 2003. I compared the number of articles mentioning the word spade with the number that use any of the synonyms for spade listed by Thesaurus.com. It’s bad news for Talknormalisers: it suggests you are about twice as likely to find someone literally not calling a spade a spade as you were six years ago.

For garden centre managers, driven insane that customers now take so long to ask for the product they want, this is – wait for it - groundbreaking research.

Seeing right through it

Published March 23, 2010 Research , Words 1 Comment
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Transparency is not always an advantage

If you want to sound honest, it’s popular to describe your organisation as accountable, ethical, or having integrity right now. These attributes are all twice as common in press releases as they were in 2002.

But if you’re looking for the really hot word at the moment to show you’re not a bunch of liars or crooks, then there really isn’t anything to compare with saying that you provide, support or exhibit transparency – a term which was almost unused 10 years ago. In Factiva’s press release archive for 2009, one out of every 44 press releases was claiming some sort of transparency. That’s almost twice as many mentions as goody-goody integrity, and four times as many as dull old accountability. Last year a claim of some type of transparency was six times as frequent as it was in 2002, when Enron and Worldcom were on our minds:

Which industry claims the most transparency? First I looked in the obvious place: the glass manufacturing industry. Its press releases rarely claim transparency:

Banking was barely above average. Perhaps the score is dragged down because when the board didn’t even understand the risks the banks faced, it’s hard for them to claim too much transparency a year or two later. Software press releases, where so many vague buzzwords are popularised, scored higher:

In the week that an ex-minister told a fake lobbyist he was a cab for hire to peddle behind-the-scenes influence for £5,000 a day, political press releases optimistically mention transparency far often more than the average:

But nothing can compare, in its determination to talk about transparency, with our winning category. It’s obviously a great relief to find that, the week after Ernst & Young was forced to deny accusations of malpractice, negligence and failure to exercise professional care in its audit of Lehman Brothers, accountancy press releases were the biggest users of transparency that I could find in 2009 – by a factor of five:

Though, perhaps, it’s less reassuring to find out that E&Y alone issued 49 press releases that mention the T-word since the beginning of 2006.

Provided you are not a glass manufacturer, your actual level of transparency is impossible to measure. It is one of those aspirational words that anyone can claim for free. Unless you are accused of helping to hide $50bn of debt for a client (for example), a claim that you provide/support/exhibit accountability/integrity/transparency will go untested. Transparency, as the least testable of the three, is also the most useful in this regard.

So good news for those of you who work for unaccountable, integrity-lite companies, if indeed such frightful companies exist: if you want to claim some fake transparency in a press release, nobody will find out that you’re bullshitting. After all, by definition, a lack of transparency is pretty hard to spot.

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The Non-Dom-Wombat Diversion

Published March 2, 2010 Pictures , Research , Words Leave a Comment
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Mutant wombat attack: this election's Cinderella issue

Conservative strategy on what we now call The Ashcroft Affair has often been to use the Wombat Diversion. So when a journalist asks about Lord Ashcroft’s non-dom tax status, a well-briefed MP will point out of the window, shout “Good lord! A giant wombat is attacking parliament!” and try to change the subject.

The Wombat Diversion is a long-standing interview technique, and not just in politics. The one time I got ask Bill Gates a question, he answered it by saying, “Actually what you should be asking is…” and answering an entirely different question, which I recall being along the lines of “Why is Microsoft so excellent?”

Of course it’s not usually giant furry critters that get the blame when politicians are misdirecting; single parents and economic migrants are much more compelling as diversions from their own faults. Also, pointing at your competition and saying “Look at them! They’re just as bad as we are”, then doing a runner, is considered a good way to change the story – and one which I note the Tories were still using yesterday.

Over the last few weeks there could be an entire battle group of oversized marsupials munching on Big Ben, cheered on by feral hoodies, and it still wouldn’t have helped the Tories escape the Ashcroft day of reckoning. If we look at the amount of coverage of Lord Ashcroft’s tax status over the years, the trend is firmly upwards. With only 2007 as a break, the proportion of political stories about the Conservative Party that mentioned him kept going up for half a decade. I speculate that this is because the dissimulation became the story – a sort of wombat feedback loop:

Labour has found a similar problem. The political interviewer’s party game in the last few months has been to try to make a Labour politician say the word “cuts”. MPs have tied themselves in entertaining linguistic knots in an attempt to avoid being associated with this word. When Evan Davies is doing the interviewing on Radio 4′s Today programme, he sometimes exhausts an entire week of the BBC’s exasperation budget when trying to get Labour ministers to say “cuts” even once.

On one hand, the political machine is winning. No one has stepped out of line, in case Gordon Brown throws a tangerine at them. But the number of articles discussing the Labour party and spending cuts continues to climb. Often the articles are not about cuts, but about how the politicians refuse to talk about those cuts: more wombat feedback. The graph is a bit more up-and-down, but mostly up, with a spectacular result last September when a quarter of all political articles about Labour mentioned the “C” word:

It’s my theory that Wombat Diversions – not just for politicians, but for anyone in the media – are becoming ineffective. We are more comfortable than our parents were with the idea of leaders (that’s CEOs and football captains as well as MPs) as liars and cheats who are cynically manipulating us based on little more than their lust for wealth and glory. On second thoughts, maybe “comfortable” isn’t quite the word, but you see what I mean. And so, at that point, we stop looking for what they are saying, and start looking for what they are not saying, and discuss that instead. The longer they keep not saying it, the harder we look.

Second, it’s much easier to spot evasion and misdirection when you can Google it afterwards. Even the BBC had good sport yesterday by stringing together a series of interviews in which senior Tories tried the Ashcroft Wombat Diversion in all its forms: strung together, the spluttering evasions were comedy gold. A Wombat Diversion might keep the story off the front pages in the short term, but thanks to internet reporting there are an unlimited number of other pages where it can incubate.

Foolish media trainers still consider this type of misdirection to be useful, but times have changed: whether a you are a product marketing manager or you’re Baron Ashcroft, it’s not up to you any more to decide what peasants talk about. For example: if people hate your set-top boxes you can’t get away with saying that you’ve got a new one coming out soon! if you have 109 one-star reviews on Amazon for the one people are buying today. Politics is going through the same process.

A sad consequence of this is that, when mutant Wombats really do attack the Mother of Parliaments, it will take us by surprise. “Why didn’t the powers that be warn us?” we will ask as giant furballs chomp their way through the House of Lords. It would be ironic, at this point, if Lord Ashcroft escaped death because he was in Belize, filling in his tax return.

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