Bingo!

As part of her practice of the fine arts of procrastination (and very productive and useful procrastination, I might say), Kirsty at Galaxy has linked to this great collection of corporate jargon and cant on the BBC website – 'Fifty office-speak phrases you love to hate'. I love it.

My favourite ones to hate are real viruses in Australia – 'going forward' (number 20) and 'at the end of the day' (number 30). Both make my skin crawl, and the later makes me wonder if they really mean at sunset. (As in, when the sun goes down, I will turn into a word-wolf and tear out the throats out of language zombies.)

But I shuddered at another one that's new to me: number 39, 'cascading'; or for the tautologically compulsive, number 40, 'cascading down'. What?

It supposedly means "to communicate or disseminate information, usually downwards". For me, it's the beer under that brand name, and the stuff that comes out the other side an hour later.

I'm looking forward to playing my first game of meeting jargon bingo next week, though my colleagues don't tend to use such crap jargon – the benefits, I guess, of working outside the corporate sector.

'Go forward' and poke fun at the pinstripe suits.

Read more!

When is a catastrophe not a catastrophe?

When it is only a 'change'.

It is very important to be clear in the language we use to talk about global warming.

Steven Poole, author of Unspeak, refers to strings of words such as 'collateral damage', and 'climate change' as attempts to persuade by stealth – or 'unspeak'. He took apart how the term 'climate change' came to supplant 'global warming' to refer to the changes to our environment caused by human produced greenhouse gasses.

This was done with the express purposes of softening the sense of threat in 'global warming'. Poole argues that a decade ago the US began their push for the language switch to 'climate change' because 'global warming' is too alarming - too threatening to their interests in coal, oil and industry.

Poole told a forum on language at the Sydney Writers Festival in May:

America and Saudi Arabia and other countries, lobbied to replace the phrase 'global warming' with 'climate change' in the early 90s in the UN because they knew that 'global warming' sounded too frightening, and it sounded like maybe burning oil maybe was to blame. 'Climate change' sounds very vague, it might be a good change, it doesn't have to be a bad change. We know that Frank Luntz, a pollster who works for the Republicans, reminded them ten years later, 'We have to say 'climate change' instead of 'global warming' because 'global warming' is too alarming, too emotional, and we had a focus group about this and one lady said that climate change sounds like you're moving to Fort Lauderdale.'

Arguments about how our language twists and veils what is really happening aren't new: George Orwell explored it, and Don Watson (wry, as usual, at the same Sydney forum Poole spoke at) has looked at how managerial language has invaded our public sphere.

I have made it a deliberate practice to refer to global warming, rather than climate change, here in this blog, in my conversations with people and when I visit and comment on other blogs.

I think it's very important. We aren't talking about lovely summer weather at the beach, here. Deliberate obfuscation must be met with deliberate clarity in our words and meaning.

ABC Radio National's Bookshow broadcast that forum in June. Unfortunately, the podcast I first heard is no longer online. However, you can find the broadcast transcript of that excellent forum here.

Read more!

Shocking language

As a wordsmith for hire, I agree that it's about the words you use. But two days for the UN Security Council to haggle out its statement over Israel's killing of Peacekepers in Lebanon? That's extreme. They couldn't agree if it were a condemnation or just a concern. They finally settled for the watered-down "deeply shocked an distressed" at Israel's missile hitting the UN observation post.

At least it has a nice resonance with Bush's 'shock and awe' in Iraq. Not much consolation for families of the killed UN soldiers, though. Neither is this post.

The ABC has the story here.

Read more!

Make the pain less

Genevieve of You Cried for Night has posted this link to some excellent tips for web-writers. As a writer and editor, I learned these tips (or are they rules?) for web writing a little while ago, but it's always worth being reminded of them, and why they're important. Especially when so well put:

"the main point is simple: reading from a screen is a pain, and writers and editors should do everything they can to make the pain less. This involves using shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs, providing ample left and right margins and off-white plain backgrounds (never patterned backgrounds, please!), dark type, clear page navigation systems, easy-to-grasp contents pages, and so forth."

That is from the editorial style guide at Jacket, a free literary magazine. Its style guide includes lots of other excellent guidelines for writers and editors, especially for web-writing. Now I want to read the actual magazine!

Read more!

On writing, blogging and 'authors'

Kerryn Goldsworthy has this fascinating thing to say about the 'author' of fiction:

"The notion of the 'implied author' is a useful one: it's what might be called the writer's best self, her wisest, her most adult, her most knowing and self-knowing self. In fiction or poetry the 'person who is speaking' just is not the same as that flawed being who ignores the dishes, fobs off her editors and creditors, loses patience with her elderly father, and swears at the person ringing from the call centre in Mumbai. None of this stuff makes its way to the pristine page: the implied author is a construct, a sort of distillation of all the best (and only the best) stuff that the writer has to say."

I wondered how much this would be true for bloggers and blogging. Not much, if we take the grumpy whingeing of some bloggers at face value, or believe utterly the kiss-and-tell-all revelations of others, or cop the opinionated political posturing of others (like yours truly).

But then again, I suspect that all these ways of expressing our selves through blogs are not far from that idea of the 'blogger as fiction' – to be the most outrageous, explicit, banal, insightful, etc etc. Anything to convince our readers that we are worth reading, and to keep coming back?

[Link via Barista]

Read more!