Murder on the Rhetoric Express

by Mark O’Brien

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“First I would straighten out the language.”
— Confucius, asked how he would restore order to the world.

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In my working life, I’ve served two of America’s major insurance and financial services organizations. Those are the terms, of course, by which those companies chose to describe themselves; and the self-referential selection of those terms indicates three things about the organizations: (1) They were clever enough to have found ways to do things with your money that you should have been clever enough to do with it yourself; (2) they were clever enough to charge you for the privilege; (3) they were clever enough to describe themselves with terms obtuse enough to keep you from understanding what they were up to.

Those terms — and the truthfulness of items 1-3 — also indicate the extent to which we’ve assassinated critical assessment of meaning as a criterion in our perceptions of business rhetoric and accepted the loss with alarming blitheness.

None of this should be surprising, given the insensitivity to language that generally pervades large organizations — that pervades, in fact, all bureaucracies large enough to have separated executive functions (making policy) from work (conducting the activities that generate the revenue that pays for the overhead of which the policy-makers ultimately are a part).

If language is the sum of its usage (I believe it is), then what’s hideous about the bureaucratic ivory tower is its deliberate detachment from the point at which language actually is used. (To illustrate: No policy-maker, nor any stooge who thought critically about the language of the policy, could look a soon-to-be-exemployee in the eye and say, “The operationalizing of our strategic downsizing scenario requires the immediate outsourcing of your present responsibilities.”)

What’s hideous about the rest of us is our willingness to adopt the lexicon passed down from the ivory tower and, again, to accept the dehumanizing detachment from meaning without a peep.

And that same linguistic laziness and irresponsibility now extends to the media — in particular (and closest to my heart) into the advertising, public relations, and marketing communications media. The apocalypse surely is upon us when we tune into NPR for our morning dose of drive-time sanity, only to hear:

Our programming is brought to you in part by NFW Corporation, a leading e-business-infrastructure outsourcing provider. NFW offers end-to-end solutions that power mission-critical e-business applications with maximum availability by providing a seamlessly integrated IT/network infrastructure; highly automated, secure operations; a broad set of highly skilled technical resources; a full range of fully deployable services; and a seamlessly interactive integration of function and content. NFW Corporation — leveraging robust, new-age technologies while maintaining real-world, value-added business expertise.

WHAT?!

Someone at NFW Corporation had to write that (unless the infrastructure in which it was written was outsourced). Someone else at NFW had to approve it. Someone at NPR had to review it, presumably with the opportunity to edit it (or, at least, to ask if it could be translated into English). And someone else at NPR had to read it for broadcast.

It’s a safe bet that the folks at NFW thought they knew what it meant. It’s a safer bet that the folks at NPR wondered about it — but let it go. It’s a sure thing that no one in NPR’s listening audience — most confoundingly, very few, if any, in what NFW would consider its target market — could make sense enough of it to listen to it, let alone make a buying decision on its merits. But we’ll hear it again tomorrow.

We’ve been hearing it for so long, we hardly even notice. In The Idler (Jan. 20, 1759), Samuel Johnson wrote, “Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore becoming necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetick [sic].”

A little more than a century later, Johnson’s countryman, Lewis Carroll, apparently was hearing similar things. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Carroll’s most famous linguistic advice was uttered by the March Hare: “Then you should say what you mean.” The Hare was talking to Alice. But that book’s most sage rhetorical admonition comes from the Duchess; and it might just as well have been directed at all of us who write, read, edit, or commission the creation of writing for our livelihoods: “Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.”

Indeed.

I do hold out hope for the sense. But the sounds of the business, news, and trade media often make it seem as if — despite the best intentions of Confucius, Johnson, Carroll, and more contemporary lovers of verbal expression — no one ever will straighten out the language. For every attempt, there will be a hundred new terms of vapid jargon coined, a thousand new arcane acronyms created, a million more hours of bureaucratic gibberish spewed. All we can do is try — resisting the chronicity and marginal reversibility of the language’s deleterious modality, in hope of collecting our individual measures of psychic income.

That’s murder.