Posts Tagged 'whateverism'

Uniquely meaningless

Published March 8, 2010 Research , Words 4 Comments
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HMS Unique: confusingly, one of 49 identical submarines

Ah! The irony. Dataram Corporation’s recent press release about measurable performance contains exactly two numbers. The first one is the information that Dataram Corp was founded 42 years ago. The second is that it was founded in 1967. So, to be strict, the press release has one number which is expressed in two different ways.

For each of those 42 years of precision measurement Dataram has apparently been:

delivering meaningful operational improvements and measurable total cost of ownership reductions… Dataram memory solutions have a track record of delivering significant performance and optimization improvements in critical applications.

I’d quote more, but then you’d have to kill yourself.

Trying to get useful information from this release, as with so many crappy self-congratulatory corporate web pages and marketing-driven white papers, is like banging your head against a giant marshmallow. It is vague wherever the precision of which Dataram boasts would be helpful. None of the many extravagant claims in the press release can be usefully understood: the company just speaks well of itself for a few hundred words. It describes operational improvements as meaningful, insight as unique, its applications as performance-driven, the performance itself as significant, its specialists as highly skilled (as opposed to all those generalist specialists out there). The result is a substantial performance improvement. It is, we read, a tremendous opportunity because performance (again) is high and the customer’s cost of ownership is substantially lower.

In other words, two paragraphs of bugger all, if that’s specific enough for you.

I write about this stuff and I have no idea what Dataram is doing here, or has been doing for 42 years, or how well it does it (is “meaningful” 10 per cent or 80 per cent? How low does something need to go before it becomes “substantially” lower?). I could read this tripe for 20 years (which sort of sums up my career so far) and still I’d have no idea.

Vague non-words like significant and substantial look like they’re telling us something, but they aren’t. They’re useful for people who have a deadline but no clear idea what they’re writing about; or people who know the numbers, don’t want to tell us what they are, but want to waste our time anyway because that’s what they’re paid to do. Often they are paid by the word, so chucking in a “substantial” here and there is basically free money.

On Factiva’s database of press releases there’s no clear trend upward or downward in the use of any of the non-words that Dataram employed to such non-effect. That would be too much to expect. Non-words have nowhere to live; so they just lie around in documents year after year, pretending to tell us something. For example, look at the graph of the use of significant and unique since 2002:

Nothing much to see there unless, of course, you are concerned that one in 12 press releases in the last eight years claims that something is unique. This seems to be setting the bar low for one-of-a-kindness.

There is, though, a worrying trend in the data. Since 2002 the frequency of press releases with just one of these annoying non-words remains roughly constant; but in 2009 you were three times as likely to find a release that claims all four of our meaningless words – that something is simultaneously significant and substantial and meaningful and unique:

Non-words are banding together to destroy our ability to think clearly. It’s literally a vague threat. Dataram’s press release is just one example of the wider problem that meaninglessness is becoming more concentrated, if such a thing is possible.

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.

Going off on ongoing

Published February 22, 2010 Research , Words Leave a Comment
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Ongoingness: a perpetual motion machine. The wheel at the top writes the email, the twisty thing sends it, and the disc on the left reads it and sends a reply to everyone. This process carries on for ever.

When Rev. Philip Gulley was promoting his book “If the Church Were Christian” last year, he complained that the ”ongoingness of the institution is all-important.” You could say the book is about the unfortunateness of the ongoingness of churchiness.

Even though ongoing has no reason to exist (telling me that there’s an ongoing discussion gives me no more information than telling me there’s a discussion, for example), it is getting more popular in the press.

It is routinely paired with other problem words to make them even more irritating than they were before: imagine that you’re about to deal a savage redundancies blow to Solihull. The first draft of your statement blames the redundancies on the problems of the economy, but that looks a bit strong. It may be true, it may be accurate, but it is not smooth and reassuring.

Perhaps in the second draft you rename “the economy” as “the current economic climate”, which sounds more reassuring already. You might also downgrade “problems” to “challenges”, but you need one more word that will knock the final hard edge off your statement.

Ongoing is that word. Bingo. A spokesperson for Fujitsu:

This has been necessitated by the ongoing challenges of the current economic climate and the resultant requirement for Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe to scale its operations in line with anticipated business volumes and mix.

Translation: we’re making 140 people redundant. With a weasel word as useful as ongoing, it’s hardly surprising that it is catching on:

But the real growth is found in pairing ongoing with words like challenge, as above. The phrase has increased in frequency by a factor of four since 2002:

Or in turning issues into ongoing issues, a phrase that is now five times as common as it was eight years ago:

There’s hardly a weasel word that you don’t find paired with ongoing. Ongoing is the Cliff Richard of weasel words: on its own, irritating yet pointless; in a duet, borderline dangerous.

Faint traces of buttock

Published January 18, 2010 Research , Words 1 Comment
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In September 2009 The Times Bugle podcast described an apology by the former CEOs of bailed-out banks in front of a UK parliamentary committee as “not so much half-arsed, as containing barely detectable traces of buttock.“

As the CEOs of the large US banks appear in front of their senior politicians to admit to as little as possible – while approving billions in bonuses from trading in a market created and supported almost entirely by central banks – it’s worth having a bit of a buttock rummage in the press to see what’s motivating our CEOs to do good.

What are we writing about corporate social responsibility these days? After all, when money’s tight, it’s a pretty obvious thing to cut back if money is more important than ethics.

On first look, there’s good news in the press coverage of CSR. The consistent rise in the number of stories about it since 2002 has continued. There are about four times as many articles about CSR now as there were in 2002, which suggests that interest hasn’t gone away:

What are these stories about? Business ethics in general have been in the news quite a bit in 2009, yet the number of stories that mentioned CSR alongside ethics or ethical behaviour, and didn’t talk about profit, dropped off suddenly:

Still, doesn’t look too bad; the long-term trend is slightly upward. And this is a rough measure: it would not capture a story about how ethics are more important than profit, for example.

Now if we look at the similar graph for CSR stories that mention profitability but not ethical behaviour, we see the opposite effect in 2009: a sudden jump.

Note the scales were different; so to see what’s really going on, let’s overlay the two trends:

Gosh! Our search is not perfect, but in 2002 there were the almost the same number of ethics-not-profit stories as profit-not-ethics stories. Since then the number of ethics-based CSR stories hasn’t really shifted, and is now declining. But look at the coverage for CSR-as-profit! That’s really taking off.

A couple of possible explanations: maybe the only way to protect a CSR programme right now is to convince shareholders and CEOs that it is all about making pots of money. Or maybe we’re all just writing stories about balance sheets now, and find business ethics a bit irrelevant.

In the banking industry in the last 12 months – a sector that has been accused both of being ethically-challenged and far too motivated by profit – there have been 82 stories on CSR that mention ethical behaviour, but not profit. There have been 548 (six times as many) CSR stories that mention profit, but not ethical behaviour.

You might think that business, and especially the financial sector, has often been half-arsed about its social responsibility. If so, these graphs seem to suggest (in Bugle terms) that the press coverage of those responsibilities shows increasingly faint traces of buttock.

Selling empowerment by the pound

Published December 7, 2009 Links , Words Leave a Comment
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no lack of power here

If you’re lacking power, don’t worry. There are a lot of people who can sell you something for that. At the time of writing, about 80 press releases in the last week were promising some form of empowerment.

Whether it’s from the ambitiously named Empower MediaMarketing (“Understanding is the bottom line”), which among other recent empowerments organised a Discovery Channel Shark Week promotion for Long John Silver Fish Tacos, or the Ladies’ Professional Golf Association (“to inspire, empower , educate and entertain by showcasing the best golf professionals in the world”), or even the Center for Applied Identity Management Research’s ongoing efforts “to empower and engage with clients in combating identity theft crimes and mitigating fraud”, there’s a lot of empowerment available – if you can pay for it.

Which isn’t really the point of a word that once described how you give victims of discrimination or poverty the ability to change their lives. Empowerment had an ethical and political meaning, which doesn’t have much relevance to tacos or golf.

The releases that mention empowerment on PR Newswire confirm that empowerment in 2009 usually involves a commercial transaction. It’s empowerment in the sense that if you buy a pair of jeans from me, I empower you to wear some new trousers.

Or, rather: “Possession of the Talk Normal LegRight Solution (TM) empowers the global community of potential denim-wearers to actualise our jeans dreams!” See? We can all get into the action.

According to Factiva, quite a few businesses are getting into it. Empowerment went almost unmentioned until recently, but not now:

I get it: it’s no longer enough to sell us a product, we have to buy a better life. Marketers have hijacked the idea of empowerment to do this, because it’s a no-risk proposition. “We don’t make promises,” these empowerers tell us, “we just sell you something to help you change yourself.”

They don’t make you happy; but they are willing, for a fee, to claim they empower you to achieve happiness. It’s not their fault if you’re too stupid, ugly, poor (or powerless) to make the best of it.

Commercial empowerment: if it works they take the credit. If it doesn’t, that’s your problem.

The dictionary of everything (even Talknormalism)

Published December 4, 2009 Links , Words Leave a Comment
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The comedian Dave Barry wrote: “If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.” We’re about to find out.

An article in Prospect Magazine (sorry the link only gives you the first few paragraphs, but enough to get the idea. And I do recommend subscribing, it’s a good read) tells us about a new dictionary called Wordnik, which has about 4 million entries, six times as many as the OED. This is because Wordnik isn’t printed, so the dictionary’s size is limited only by the size of its hard disk. When Wordnik finds new words it’s not snobby. It simply adds them to the database with the context in which it found them (for example, the tweet or the blog post). It doesn’t make arbitrary judgements as to what is a “proper” word or not, it just reflects what people are typing.

I like two things about Wordnik. First, the way that it uses the context in which it finds words to show meaning, so we can spot the enemy in its natural habitat. Take an example of recent office jargon like deliverable, for example (looked up 72 times on Wordnik so far, presumably by people at their desks thinking “I have to give them a what?”). The traditional dictionary definitions (Capable of being, or about to be, delivered; necessary to be delivered) don’t give any clue that it has become one of those words that sets our teeth on edge. But read the sentences provided as context instead, and you soon get the full horror.

The second is that is gives me the chance to make my mark on history. Talknormalism has not yet been discovered by Wordnik, but I would like to believe it’s a matter of time (it would help if you’d retweet it and blog it about a bit until I’m picked up). Imagine my pride when I point a bony finger at the entry in Wordnik in the years to come, and say to awestruck youngsters, that’s my word, that is.

Meanwhile if you’re at a loose end for the end of the week, use Wordnik to pick a random word: I discovered I was the first person to look up taxable-equivalent, but the 305th to look up cake. So in this case, at least, we’ve still got our priorities in the correct order.

Feeling relaxed? Then watch this

Published November 20, 2009 Interviews , Pictures Leave a Comment
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It’s a couple of years old now, but if anyone can find a more toe-curling radio interview than this classic, recorded with Icelandic ban Sigur Ros for NPR, I’d like to hear it. Scratch that! I don’t want to hear it, I’m still too tense after listening to this one all the way through. Next time that I’m struggling to work out the definition of 10 Base-F having asked someone to explain it five times, I’ll count my blessings.

All together now

Published November 18, 2009 Pictures , Research 1 Comment
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I’m in the middle of writing a book about the epic fails of capitalism (a project that’s got much bigger in the last 12 months), and in the part of the book that deals with mergers – a rich source of epic failure – there’s one that stands head and shoulders above the rest: AOL and Time Warner.

When we were doing the research into the press coverage of the merger, one thing stands out: the number of reporters who faithfully wrote down that the two businesses would capitalise on their synergies, without really asking what those synergies might actually, you know, be.

Synergy is a weasel word for making people redundant and selling the buildings that they worked in, and also a vague placeholder for we want some of their stuff to make our stuff work better. In the first case, using it avoids awkward words like redundancy that make people glum, and in the second, it avoids actually telling us what they are going to do.

It’s now pretty clear that AOL-Time Warner needed a lot of the first type of synergy, because there was bugger all of the second type.

I went back to the Factiva database to see whether there are more businesses claiming synergy these days, and there are, big time. I searched in the European and North American business press, and compared the number of articles mentioning mergers with the number mentioning mergers and synergies too. M&A volumes may be at their lowest for five years but the synergy bubble never bursts. Mentions of synergy are 402 per cent up in the last 30 years, and the rise has been wonderfully consistent:

In just over 30 years it has become five times as likely that a business will describe a merger as providing synergies (or, at least, that this lazy rebranding will be reported in the press).

It might just be that synergy has just become a vogue word. But I think it’s also due to positive word bias, which is far more of a problem.

To explain: every M&A deal has some rationale beyond a pooling of capital and saving on letterheads. The benefits can be difficult to explain, easy to question, or impossible to measure accurately. Three reasons not to go into too much detail if you want to push it through quickly – especially if you’re directly or indirectly incentivised to make the merger work. If you want to create momentum in the media or among shareholders and employees (and in your own mind) it helps to give the benefits a positive-sounding, catchy, go-for-it name.

That name is synergy: code for the things we don’t really want to talk about right now. It won’t make your merger work any better, but it might make more people believe that it will. And if your reward comes more from the deal than the messy aftermath, it pays to talk about synergy.

Pizza muco caldo

Published November 13, 2009 Pictures , Words Leave a Comment
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Talknormalism also takes in the appropriate naming of foodstuffs on menus. At least, it does now:

four cheeses

Fine dining on Delta

This is what Delta Airlines rather fancily calls a quattro formaggi pizza (that’s four cheeses). Maybe someone at Delta thought the name was exotic. I checked on the back of the packet, and indeed it does have vanishingly small amounts of four different cheeses listed on the ingredient panel. So Delta is not breaking any laws, unless it’s against the law to serve foul-smelling warm goop to starving passengers trapped in a small metal tube thousands of feet above freezing water who don’t have any choice.

As you can see, I still ate it. Don’t blame me. I’d been on the plane for seven hours. I was institutionalised. I’d have eaten a microwaved gerbil if they had served it to me. In fact, I’d probably have chosen it in preference to this.

If I named this pizza, I’d have gone for something more honest like pizza muco caldo*.

* Translation available here.

Whatever doesn’t work

Published October 12, 2009 Research , Words Leave a Comment
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Don’t know if you caught the the news from the Marist Institute in New York last week that Americans find whatever to be the most irritating phrase in the language. It even beat my particular favourite, at the end of the day, and left going forward in the dust.

A company spokesperson declines to comment

A company spokesperson declines to comment


I could provide a rant about how rude it is to use “whatever” in the I don’t care if you deserve an answer, I’m a sulky teenager so I’m not talking sense, but there have already been lots of articles like that and I’m late to this party. So without defending whateverism, I’d point out that people in suits often do the same thing, but they use fancy language and have PR consultants to help them pretend it’s something else.

I’m talking about the unjustified no commenting which translates as “we know something that would be helpful to you if we told you it, we’re just choosing not to tell you it”. There were about 30 of these in the British press alone last week – and that’s just the ones that got reported.

I’m not saying that every question needs an answer. There are plenty of good reasons for not commenting. There might be legal restrictions, or you might need to keep something secret until a particular day for commercial reasons. That’s your business, I’m not your boss. But what really irks me is a no comment either when there’s a clear public interest to be served or a clear business reason to comment – because, for example, it shows respect for angry customers.

Controlling politicians and public servants are in the first category. Listening to Radio 4 – PM, or especially The World at One – it sometimes seems that every other story ends up with Eddie Mair or Martha Kearney saying “we asked the government for comment but they told us that no one was available”. It’s the worst kind of whateverism. What they mean is, “You might have a point, and we don’t want to talk to you for exactly that reason”. It’s openly admitting that self-interest comes before accountability.

The second category is made up of fools who think that talking to the media should only be done when they have something to sell, and that the rest of the time that journalists are useful idiots who can be ignored. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable to give comment when people aren’t going to tell you you’re wonderful, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea to fess up.

If you are in my lazy fool category, I have two reasons you’re an idiot:

1. People don’t automatically need and respect you any more just because you are director of X for company Y. Readers and viewers are not likely to say that’s all right then, he’s obviously too busy working in my interest, it’s not for the likes of us to question the powers that be. If you want to work in that environment, it’s best to build a time machine and set it for 1952.
2. You’re not my only source. If there’s a real problem that you’re refusing to comment on, you can ignore the conversation – but nowadays we’ll have the the conversation without you, thanks. There are literally millions of sources of news out there, and thanks to blogs, chatrooms and YouTube, saying no comment to one journalist doesn’t kill a story like it did in the good old days. You’ve still got 20 one-star reviews on Amazon whether you decide to comment or not.

It doesn’t help when idiot spokespeople copy politicians, even fictional ones. Every time someone raises an eyebrow and uses the quote from the political drama House of Cards to me, “you might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment,” I just want to punch them in their smug faces.

If more spokespeople just started saying, “yeah, like, whatever” instead of their elaborate excuses not to communicate, the world would be a more honest place. And it would open up new opportunities in corporate communications for feral teenagers, where their demographic is scandalously under-represented.

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Talknormalisation in action: Local Govt Assn wants to ban 250 jargon words

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