something new and different: a post about words.

This is supposed to be a blog about "words on paper and those who put them there..." so today I decided to actually do a post in keeping with my mission. Happy now? Thought so.

Clive Thompson at Collision Detection has this post about language with some thoughtfully contrarian analysis of his own added for good measure. The comments are good too, give 'em a read. I especially agreed with the following comment from Thompson himself:

"What's truly terrifying is the number of people who use management jargon because it says precisely what they want to say."

I once inquired via email about a church's contemporary worship position. I got an almost immediate response from the pastor with a total of one complete sentence in it. The last "sentence" in the email was: Could overnight me a DVD of you leading worship and some cd’s of you leading?

I decided that I wouldn't want to work for someone who couldn't take the time to write the word "you" and who obviously had more general problems with coherent and complete english sentences. I didn't have a DVD to send him either, but that's beside the point.

This kind of thing isn't exactly what Thompson is on about, but I think it's symptomatic of the sort of disregard for language that is increasingly common in and outside of business.

Please don't think I'm an uptight grammarian type. I love to play with language, I love experimenting with it even when those experiments don't work. That is how we learn after all. Our language experiments, though, should evoke life, emotion, and relationships, not sterilize them.

Some advice for avid users of management-ese: Please, respect the language! Bend it, don't break it. And please don't impose a corporate vocabulary and vernacular outside of your dim little world, I sacrificed a lot to get out of that place and I don't plan on going back through your words.

Jannotti tag: writing