Words of Mass Destruction
Maureen Dowd’s Op-Ed piece in the NY Times describes last Saturday’s Gridiron dinner in Washington. Mrs Cheney, wife of the Vice (and I mean Vice) President was giving a speech, and she said of her husband that he had a great sense of humour. “Just the other day I asked him, Do you know how many terrorists it takes to paint a wall? And he answered right back ‘It depends on how hard you throw them.’ Tres diplomatique, uh, Dick.
In this month’s Vanity Fair, there’s an article on the ‘sixteen words that changed the world.’ “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” If I tell you he made the word uranium sound like nucular, you’ll be left in no doubt as to the demagogue from whose lips the word stumbled.
And of course whilst no contender, Democrat or Republican, has officially thrown a hat in the ring for 2008, the rhetorical barbs have already begun. Hillary is being described by her opponents at every opportunity as ‘angry’ or ‘brittle’. In spite of the fact that she’ll have raised something in the region of $75 million for her campaign before it begins in earnest, a couple of relentlessly applied adjectives may just be her downfall.
With only 26 letters available to you, you can craft words that jab and gouge like Lynne Cheney’s. Words that devastate and diminish or those that evaporate in thin air. With those 26 symbols, billions of books have been written, billions more wait in pens, and still we live in a world of cavalier Woofing. Woofing’s an old black folklore term that describes the purposeless barking of dogs in the night. Listen in to most business meetings or Prime Minister’s Questions and you’ll hear lots of it … ego strutting and case making, with few who can truly be in a conversation, because most of them are trying to win the conversation.
Semantic abuse has emptied many of our words of their true meaning and they’ve been appropriated so the bland can lead the bland. Our immune systems are impervious to words like empowerment and synergy; to expressions like “our greatest assets go up and down in the elevators every day ….” I find it a great discipline when editing my own talks to do the Ricky Gervais test. Imagine your words in David Brent’s mouth and you’ll know whether they should be in yours.
Organisations over the last decade or so have spent countless millions on initiatives like 360 degree feedback (‘feedback’ in the sense of ‘bullshit’) Just as the additives we inject in to our foods to give them a longer life end up being the negatives that kill us quicker, the verbiage generated by endless forms do nothing but puff up corporate intelligence like Chelsea boys on steroids. It feeds into our need to control. To control our children, our diet, our workforce, the Middle East.
Real conversations are few and far between, because people are afraid of talking to each other. Small talk or big talk, we’ve become incapable of using words that reveal, rather than create who we are. We’ve always talked about writers, singers, artists ‘finding’ their voices. The same should be true of lawyers, bankers, politicians. And in every case, we need to forget control, and try to connect.
A year ago I went to see the play Stuff Happens at the National. David Hare’s take on the run up to the war in Iraq, its immediacy and the fact that much of the dialogue was actually spoken, make many of its characters comments crass in the extreme (the title taken from Donald Rumsfeld’s response to the chaos in Iraq). In one scene, Colin Powell spends four weeks in negotiation after the first US draft of Resolution 1441 is rejected by all fourteen other members of the Security Council. After seven weeks, arguments about the wording have reached a bitter stand-off. The French insist that there may be serious consequences should Iraq be in material breach of the resolution, as evidenced by “A false declaration ‘and’ a general failure to co-operate.”
The Americans prefer the word ‘or’.
The dispute over this single word lasts five days. Powell goes to Condoleeza Rice to get her take on the dispute over the word. Condi supposedly squares it with the President and on November 8th, Powell conceded the word ‘or’ and the Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1441.
Maybe it didn’t take 16 words to change the world, maybe it was just one.
If you want people to hang on to your every word, I’d suggest that you do. It’s better not knowing what to do with words than not knowing what you’ve done with them. Treat them with the reverence they deserve and they’ll be linguistic ambassadors. They’ll touch, inspire, stroke, heal, and above all, they’ll connect.
It’ll save you being a Dick.
In this month’s Vanity Fair, there’s an article on the ‘sixteen words that changed the world.’ “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” If I tell you he made the word uranium sound like nucular, you’ll be left in no doubt as to the demagogue from whose lips the word stumbled.
And of course whilst no contender, Democrat or Republican, has officially thrown a hat in the ring for 2008, the rhetorical barbs have already begun. Hillary is being described by her opponents at every opportunity as ‘angry’ or ‘brittle’. In spite of the fact that she’ll have raised something in the region of $75 million for her campaign before it begins in earnest, a couple of relentlessly applied adjectives may just be her downfall.
With only 26 letters available to you, you can craft words that jab and gouge like Lynne Cheney’s. Words that devastate and diminish or those that evaporate in thin air. With those 26 symbols, billions of books have been written, billions more wait in pens, and still we live in a world of cavalier Woofing. Woofing’s an old black folklore term that describes the purposeless barking of dogs in the night. Listen in to most business meetings or Prime Minister’s Questions and you’ll hear lots of it … ego strutting and case making, with few who can truly be in a conversation, because most of them are trying to win the conversation.
Semantic abuse has emptied many of our words of their true meaning and they’ve been appropriated so the bland can lead the bland. Our immune systems are impervious to words like empowerment and synergy; to expressions like “our greatest assets go up and down in the elevators every day ….” I find it a great discipline when editing my own talks to do the Ricky Gervais test. Imagine your words in David Brent’s mouth and you’ll know whether they should be in yours.
Organisations over the last decade or so have spent countless millions on initiatives like 360 degree feedback (‘feedback’ in the sense of ‘bullshit’) Just as the additives we inject in to our foods to give them a longer life end up being the negatives that kill us quicker, the verbiage generated by endless forms do nothing but puff up corporate intelligence like Chelsea boys on steroids. It feeds into our need to control. To control our children, our diet, our workforce, the Middle East.
Real conversations are few and far between, because people are afraid of talking to each other. Small talk or big talk, we’ve become incapable of using words that reveal, rather than create who we are. We’ve always talked about writers, singers, artists ‘finding’ their voices. The same should be true of lawyers, bankers, politicians. And in every case, we need to forget control, and try to connect.
A year ago I went to see the play Stuff Happens at the National. David Hare’s take on the run up to the war in Iraq, its immediacy and the fact that much of the dialogue was actually spoken, make many of its characters comments crass in the extreme (the title taken from Donald Rumsfeld’s response to the chaos in Iraq). In one scene, Colin Powell spends four weeks in negotiation after the first US draft of Resolution 1441 is rejected by all fourteen other members of the Security Council. After seven weeks, arguments about the wording have reached a bitter stand-off. The French insist that there may be serious consequences should Iraq be in material breach of the resolution, as evidenced by “A false declaration ‘and’ a general failure to co-operate.”
The Americans prefer the word ‘or’.
The dispute over this single word lasts five days. Powell goes to Condoleeza Rice to get her take on the dispute over the word. Condi supposedly squares it with the President and on November 8th, Powell conceded the word ‘or’ and the Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1441.
Maybe it didn’t take 16 words to change the world, maybe it was just one.
If you want people to hang on to your every word, I’d suggest that you do. It’s better not knowing what to do with words than not knowing what you’ve done with them. Treat them with the reverence they deserve and they’ll be linguistic ambassadors. They’ll touch, inspire, stroke, heal, and above all, they’ll connect.
It’ll save you being a Dick.
posted by Caroline at 6:34 AM
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