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Access
“The program seeks to assist seniors in accessing appropriate services,” says an earnest nonprofit’s brochure (mercifully shielding the impressionable elders from accessing anything inappropriate). Elsewhere, a policy paper blames one community’s high rates of unemployment on a widespread “failure to access the full array of available supports.” “It should be possible,” asserts an otherwise thoughtful report on public housing, “for residents to access education, employment, and training opportunities through an on-site office or service designed for them.” The mammoth popularity of the verb TO ACCESS in civic and foundation circles might strike some people as perverse, given that it is both ugly and vague. The ugliness may, admittedly, be just a matter of taste. But the vagueness is beyond dispute. Yet that may be the very reason why the word seems to turn up just about everywhere.
When you describe people’s ability “to access health care,” as several foundations are apt to do, are you talking about their ability to get to the clinic or hospital? And if so, would that be a reference to the availability of public transportation, the distance involved, or the difficulty of navigating the building in a wheelchair? Might you instead be referring to patients’ ability to get insurance to pay for services? Their knowledge of what services to use? The availability of a specialist who can treat their problem? The availability of doctors or nurses who speak their language? Their ability
to get enough attention from overburdened professionals? Depending on where you’re working, and with whom, access could mean any of these things. Or all of them. The word is most often nothing more than a stand-in for “get” — as in, “people can’t get decent health care around here.”
So why not just say “get” or “get to”? One reason, no doubt, is that the simple Saxon “get” is simply passé. But there is surely something a bit worse going on here: Using such a generic word as “get” would make it obvious to any sixth-grader that the writer is not saying anything special or profound. A program that helps seniors or unemployed people “get services” would hardly sound remarkable, and would provoke in any curious reader the natural question, “Get services how?” The forbiddingly Frenchified Latin of ACCESS doesn’t answer that question any better, but it quiets the reader with a promise of implied wisdom and erudition. Unfortunately, the promise is illusory. On close inspection, the word is all but meaningless.
The cure for verbal ills like ACCESS is not just to stick with old words (although “get” has earned the distinction of being useful to English speakers since at least 100 years before Chaucer was born). The solution is to say more precisely what kind of access you want to discuss — questions of location? transportation? price? quality? supply? — and use words, whether new or old, that zero in on those concerns. Anything else will draw solemn nods of approval from people within the philanthropic inner circle and little more than blank stares from everyone else.
Accountability
There is something fundamentally wholesome about the idea of ACCOUNTABILITY in philanthropy, and many of its uses are welcome and deadly serious. When grantmakers and nonprofits talk about their own accountability — to the public, to the people they are trying to benefit, and to one another — they are on to an important topic, one that deserves plenty of careful thought. Unfortunately, the word accountability has acquired, by its sheer overuse, the kind of solemn grandeur that often substitutes for thought, rather than encouraging it. Look at the example on teacher quality quoted earlier: The foundation was calling for more use of data on “America’s teacher workforce … for greater ACCOUNTABILITY and smarter decisionmaking.” Sounds responsible, scientific, and reasonable, no?
Now answer this: Accountable for what, to whom, with what consequences? Should teachers be called to account for their students’ test scores? For the teachers’ own mastery of pedagogy or the subjects they teach? For the academic and professional training they’ve completed (what another author calls “hoops and hurdles”), or only for their knowledge and achievements in the classroom? And most of all, who should publish, read, and act on these accounts? The sweet purr of ACCOUNTABILITY makes it easy for writers to tiptoe right past all those nettlesome questions. The word seems to speak volumes, yet it is actually little more than articulate silence.
The beauty of ACCOUNTABILITY in many (not all) of its philanthropic uses is that it seems to discharge a heavy fiduciary duty without breaking a sweat. That is not, to be sure, a foible unique to philanthropy. Business and government have made an art of publishing reams of data, using a few of the numbers to aggrandize their accomplishments, and then pirouetting around any unflattering information so that an ordinary reader is unlikely to make heads or tails of it. When corporations do this in their “accountability” to stockholders, analysts, and securities regulators, prosecutors get interested and people can lose their life savings. When civic and nonprofit groups do it, the losses are harder to calculate. But among the losers is democracy.
Action
One of the surest signs that someone is trying to impress you with an image of indomitable force and steamroller determination is the tendency to drop ACTION into every other sentence — especially in tortured constructions where the word turns into a verb or modifier. A brusque, no-nonsense colleague recently recommended to me “a couple of action items with which to move forward” on a stalled project — a gust of verbal cold air that instantly put me on double notice: We would not be wasting our time on merely inert items, and we would not be moving backward or sideways, as other people are prone to do. Apparently the simple expression “let’s get these two things done” would have immobilized us or ground our gears into reverse. By now, the redundant expressions “action items,” “action plans,” and “action agendas” are all but ubiquitous.
Far sillier, though increasingly common, is the verb TO ACTION, as in “the committee decided that it would action only the first two items” — presumably leaving the other items inactioned until later. Laugh if you will, but this verbal fad seems to be sweeping the English-speaking world far beyond the inner cloisters of philanthropy.4 Soon after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an American general proudly reported that Iraqis were bringing his troops useful information about local troublemakers “because they feel confident we will action on it.” I believe the Iraqis will back me up on this point: Confidence is one thing the verb TO ACTION does not inspire.
At the risk of making a crude generalization, I’d speculate that any time you find the word ACTION overused, especially as a verb or adjective, you are someplace where too little is being done. When people are really sweating, and bold events are whizzing by, there is usually no time for pomposities like “action this.” As I recall, you never heard Errol Flynn talk about “action” while he was hanging by one hand from a mizzen mast with the cannonballs flying, but ACTION was the first word the critics clung to, from the safety of their office chairs, on the morning after the premier.
Action Plan
There are, we presume, inaction plans somewhere in the world. But surely no one would write about them publicly. With apologies to Gertrude Stein, a plan is a plan is a plan.
Analysis
This long-suffering word once enjoyed a clear, useful meaning, rooted in the Greek classics. ANALYZE is to logic what "dissect" is to biology: taking apart the pieces and thus, by examining them, understanding the whole. Sadly, it has now come to mean "thinking about anything for more than a few minutes." It is nowadays a challenge to find any paper that does not purport to analyze its subject, no matter what approach the paper actually takes - dissection, description, deduction, or mere rumination.
Assist
Sixty years after Fowler first complained about it, ASSIST still haunts the halls of government, academia, philanthropy, and everyplace else where good is supposedly done. Evidently afraid of patronizing their beneficiaries with mere "help," charities are irritatingly prone to offer ASSISTANCE at every turn. "Training modules are designed to assist programs and trainers reach the least job-ready." "This grant will assist the organization to plan a comprehensive response to mental illness and homelessness in the targeted areas."
In both cases, the excessively dainty reliance on ASSIST led the writer into an ungainly or even ungrammatical expression (the first example, stripped even of the modestly correct "to," is especially unforgivable). The clear meaning was "help." ASSIST was pure frippery. Yet it would be hard to find a more common example of posturing anywhere in the human services.
At-Risk
This mystifying expression owes its popularity to one embarrassing fact: The phrase almost always designates a category of people of whom it is awkward to speak honestly. Almost every branch of charity or human service uses AT-RISK to describe the people whom its practitioners are... well, worried about. Here is one sample definition, from Education Week:
AT-RISK describes a student with socioeconomic challenges, such as poverty or teen pregnancy, which may place them [sic] at a disadvantage in achieving academic, social, or career goals. Such students are deemed "at risk" of failing, dropping out, or "falling through the cracks."
Generalize from education to other fields of social concern, and AT-RISK becomes simply the polite euphemism for "headed into trouble." But in today's etiquette of upbeat and respectful neutrality, it would be considered grotesquely prejudicial, not to say hostile, to describe people that way. AT-RISK, however, is regarded as abstract enough to be polite, even in mixed company.
Yet if those who use this word are honest, they must admit to being perfectly comfortable classifying people according to a vast realm of unspecified problems that those people do not even have yet. Many people therefore read with scant discomfort that a program "addresses the needs of at-risk youth," never demanding the least description of what the youth are at-risk of. Everyone presumably already knows: The youth are headed into trouble.
Now, we are not so coarse as to suggest describing troubled people as "troubled." But surely there are some descriptions slightly more explicit than AT-RISK that do not offend the sensitivity gendarmes. The sibling euphemisms "disadvantaged" and "underserved" are admittedly overused, but unlike AT-RISK, they are at least not transparently unfinished thoughts.
Even when a writer decides that no other expression but AT-RISK could possibly do, it may be healthy at least to spend a moment asking, of what? If it is possible to answer that question concisely - as in "of violence," "of pregnancy," or "of dropping out of school" - then it would be a step in the right direction simply to finish the thought that at-risk begins. "This program addresses the needs of youth who are at risk of dropping out of school" or "who may be drawn into gangs," or "who risk early pregnancy."
In some cases, of course, the writer genuinely may not know what a person's real risk is. That is a sad fact - not about writers, or about jargon, but about life. Often, people really are simply headed into trouble, and we can't say exactly what that trouble might be. Would that it were different. But when it's not, perhaps AT-RISK truly is the best we can do.
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