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Capacity
Foundations, to their great credit, have lately taken a more deliberate interest in the management, staffing, structure, and operating methods of the organizations they support. The unassailable premise of this interest is that good works do not accomplish themselves, but are carried out by organizations that may be managed well or ill, may perform their tasks efficiently or wastefully, and may need to change their methods as circumstances dictate. Making grants and providing expert advice (a/k/a TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE) to help these organizations run better is a profoundly philanthropic mission, and smart besides.
So why has such a good idea brought with it such an infestation of vague, quasi-occult terms, beginning with CAPACITY? Largely because it relies, of necessity, on the scholarly disciplines of management and administration for its ideas and its supply of experts. And those fields have for half a century been a wellspring of weird and abstruse vocabulary. The administrative disciplines, which together constitute more an art than a science, have been particularly rife (as are many of the arts) with terms and phrases that only their practitioners really understand. Turn those words loose in the generalist world of a foundation, and they are likely to proliferate out of all control.
Hunting down all the strange locutions that creep under the wallpaper of modern organizational theory would be a task far beyond the scope of this essay. We instead aim our fumigants specifically at CAPACITY, because it has thrived the most spectacularly in the groves of philanthropy - pastures in which, evidently, the word has no natural predators and so can multiply at will.
A single paper - produced by a respected program of management consultancy for nonprofits - speaks of "capacity assessments," "capacity investment," a "capacity shortage," and the ever popular "capacity-building." Most of the time, it seems, the word refers to some combination of personnel, computers, and operating procedures. Those are found to be in short supply, and need to be "assessed," "built," or "invested in." So far, so good: As long as the term is meant as a deliberately nebulous reference to all the myriad things that make organizations run, it does its sloppy job reasonably well.
(Yet even then, the word invokes the strange metaphor of a jug or canister, whose "capacity" is measured by its ability to hold whatever is dumped into it. Is this really the image we want for high-performing organizations? But never mind.)
The problem is that CAPACITY is not content to halt demurely at the border between generalities and specifics. Even when a writer is trying to describe specific characteristics of organizations, CAPACITY often shows up as if it were denoting something in particular. One paper, for example, notes that an organization "lacks the capacity to manage so many projects at once." Meaning what, exactly? There are not enough people to do all the managing? The people don't have the technology to handle information on all their projects? Or the people and technology aren't working efficiently, and need better procedures? Any of those would be an interesting point, but each is quite a different point. And CAPACITY doesn't actually express any of them. Worse, by seeming sophisticated, the word may fool people into believing they've been told something.
Often, the writer who uses CAPACITY genuinely doesn't know what an organization's problem really is. In a proposal to examine the problems and make recommendations, for example, it is more than reasonable to admit that fact. "There seems to be a problem of capacity here," a frank paper might conclude, "but the contents of that problem are unknown and need to be studied." Fine - when couched in that kind of honest uncertainty, the word is mostly unobjectionable. But when it appears to imply something specific (an act of imposture of which the word is constantly guilty), it ought to be deleted and replaced with honest, old-fashioned terms like "staffing," "record-keeping," "management" (or the specialized younger sibling "information management"), or something on that order.
Challenges/Challenged
In its original sense, the verb CHALLENGE was positively crimson with menace. Derived from the Anglo-Norman word for "calumny," it described the kind of mortal affront that led men into duels. It has by now been so thoroughly emasculated that, with all its remaining fangs bared, it could not frighten the neighbor's cat, much less provoke anyone to arms.
In its domesticated state, some might argue that there is no real offense in using CHALLENGE. Jargon it certainly is not. Yet its meaning is so diffuse and all-inclusive-on a par, perhaps, with that ubiquitous placeholder appropriate-that it serves, like many jargon words, to convey a false impression that something has been revealed or some position taken. In fact, when most people speak of mincing words, they are referring to expressions like "challenging litigation," or "fiscal challenges." In each case, the reality is far more troublesome than the cowardly expression conscripted to its service. The unintentional but certain message of those euphemisms is that the writer is too effete or timid to speak frankly about being hauled into court or impending bankruptcy.
A writer friend of mine first drew my attention to these expressions with this note:
"Physically challenged," introduced a few years ago, was one of those well-intentioned terms that invited ridicule almost as soon as it hit the page. People were jokingly calling short people "vertically challenged" within a week. It's arguable that this euphemism has caused more harm than good to the dignity of disabled people.
Injuries and disabilities aren't the only tough subjects that have been swept under the CHALLENGE carpet. The euphemism has likewise made its way into business papers, civic plans, and, most of all, foundation documents, whenever unpleasant realities threaten to rile the mighty. "Scaling up this demonstration project is fraught with challenges" almost certainly means that the odds of a successful expansion are one in ten. "The grantee is coping with organizational challenges" means it's time to send in the auditors. Strategic plans rarely speak of "risks" or "dangers" any more, at least in the more genteel circles. Everything's a "challenge," and, thanks to that, the people who might be tackling and solving problems are instead left, like the neighbor's cat, to purr unworried and unwarned.
Community
Few words irritate careful writers and editors more than this one, which has become a catchall term for any group of people with practically anything in common. Its etymology (literally "unity together," with the original Latin meaning of "fellowship") would seem to make this word apply only to a deeply close-knit group that shares some fundamental, spiritual connection. But there is no justification for insisting on such a narrow definition. In English, COMMUNITY has applied for centuries to practically any association among people, whether profound or superficial. The almost boundless vagueness of this word is therefore not a new invention, an affectation, or a subterfuge. Jargon it's not. But vague it is, and therefore an invitation to mental sloppiness.
In some recent expressions like "community development" or "community organizing," the word started off as real jargon - trendy and obscure, with multiple meanings - but it has gained a certain practiced precision, built up over time. COMMUNITY now means, in these contexts, a group of people living near one another who share, by reason of their common residence, some political or economic interests. In this sense, the word can actually be preferable over more precise words like "neighborhood," because some such communities aren't urban enough to be clustered into neighborhoods.
But more often, in phrases like "the intelligence community," "the arts community," or "the child-welfare community," the word drops a deliberate scrim in front of a bunch of shadowy people whom no one is expected to identify. Most of the time, those who use such phrases really mean to say "people in these fields whom I consider important, but can't or won't name." Used that way, the word falsely pretends to give information, while actually blotting out important details.
Worse, that use of COMMUNITY is sometimes deliberately misleading. It implies a unanimity among members that rarely occurs in reality. These COMMUNITIES that speak so conveniently in unison may suit the polemical purposes of some writers, but not without seeming a little fraudulent. When "the Harlem community" supports or opposes a new shopping center, it is a near certainty that a group of individuals, and not all the residents of Harlem, share one view of the development. Used this way, as with SITE, the word may be just the result of careless diction, but it exposes the writer to suspicions of dishonesty.
In the earlier essay In Other Words, we discussed one version of this polymorphous word: the annoying sense in which it describes any group of people with practically anything in common. But readers' response to that essay made it clear that we had been too easy on COMMUNITY, neglecting one of the other ways it has muddied philanthropic discourse. Quite apart from near-oxymorons like "the diplomatic community," "the academic community," and "the arts community," the far more mysterious use of the word is in its plainest and most generic sense: THE COMMUNITY-meaning, it seems, something like "the universal fellowship of all regular folks." For example, "mentally ill people should live in the community," "service should be provided in the community," and "the community must decide how to respond." Should elderly people be helped to remain "in the community" (meaning, we presume, somewhere this side of Antarctica), or would it be more to the point to say "at home"?
There may well be a difference between those two ideas, but if there is, the word COMMUNITY does not convey it. When mental health programs are told that their work should be done "in the community," they are probably being told that their hospitals and clinics are too far away from where their customers live. But the word doesn't say that, unfortunately-especially not if we read in an adjoining article that the "health care community" is doing something or other. Are the services of the "health care community" not in "the community"? We're back to oxymorons again.
Whoever wrote that services belong in "the community" no doubt wanted to urge that services be provided in "residential neighborhoods where many patients live." To replace that specific idea with a formless placeholder like THE COMMUNITY is to presume that everyone already knows what you're really talking about. And if that's the case, why are you talking at all?
Comprehensive
In recent years, perhaps as a reaction to the narrow "categorical" social policies of the 1960s and '70s, social thinking has ballooned into [being COMPREHENSIVE] at every opportunity. But so long as philosophers and scientists continue to puzzle over a unifying theory of everything, it is a safe bet that hardly anything will be truly comprehensive. Addressing more than one thing at a time is admirable, but calling that comprehensive essentially ducks the really important question: Just how many things are you addressing, and how realistic is that?
The boundless enthusiasm of COMPREHENSIVE is admirable (who wouldn't prefer to solve everything, rather than just a few things?). But one chore of clear writing is to help such enthusiasm find-dare we say it? - some perimeters. A graduate-school research paper several years back began its concluding section with the cliché "All things considered...," to which a weary professor scribbled the concise marginal put-down, "ambitious." That is essentially the problem with COMPREHENSIVE. It implies the due consideration of a great many things, maybe even everything, but fails to own up to its limits.
A COMPREHENSIVE initiative conveniently purports to unify all the important targets and direct action at all of them at once. The unstated presumption is that unimportant targets are, of course, omitted. And exactly which ones are those? Ahem, well, now, surely that is obvious...
COMPREHENSIVE has become all but compulsory in discussions of social policy and human services. Comprehensive planning, comprehensive reform, comprehensive alliances, comprehensive community-building. The word's vagueness alone should be enough to arouse suspicions.
Conceptualize
“The foundation’s program,” says a publication on leadership development, “strives to shape new ways of conceptualizing leadership as not merely a quality of individuals but as embedded in complex ways in social systems.” This use of CONCEPTUALIZE, like most uses outside the philosophical and psychiatric journals, simply means “think about,” nothing more. The word appears in the sentence about leadership, it seems, for only one reason: to impress the gullible reader. It adds no meaning beyond a simple reference to thought. Yet by dressing up the mere act of thinking in an elaborate, five-syllable word, the author seems to suggest that this thinking is, in itself, somehow singularly important. To some eyes, it might even suggest that people in foundations are doing a kind or quality of thinking that other people, in their mundane, plebeian thoughts about leadership, do not or cannot do. To a reader who takes such implications personally, the word would be annoying, not just because it is unnecessary but because it seems to convey a subtle put-down (which, I happen to know, the author of this passage would never intend).
But even assuming that most readers aren’t so thin-skinned as to sniff out a subtext like that, or to take offense at it, we still might reasonably ask: Why doll up such an ordinary idea in so much embroidery? Wouldn’t it make much more sense to save your cleverest, most original wordplay for the thing you’re thinking about, rather than for the mere act of thinking? (Admittedly, in the case of the sentence we cited, what the author is actually thinking about has something to do with qualities complexly embedded in social systems. That would appear to be a destination even more forbidding than the long and winding conceptualization that leads to it.)
Why make your reader pause for reflection over some hypothetical thought process, rather than over the object of that process? The answer is that, too often, that kind of navel-gazing really is what interests people who write about philanthropy and public affairs. The process by which they arrive at an idea (no doubt a rich and provocative process, at least some of the time) fascinates them no end. The photo-processing company mentioned earlier was no doubt similarly enthralled by its ingeniously engineered on-site capabilities. Trouble is, these things are usually a bit less fascinating to other people, and can serve to distract them from the real point one is hoping to make — or even lose their attention entirely.
It’s not that the process is necessarily unimportant. Let’s take it as given that the way foundation people think about leadership really leads them to better, more imaginative activity. It may even be worthwhile — once the reader’s interest is piqued by some hint of what that activity actually is — to explain that a particular way of thinking led to its discovery or refinement. But until people become genuinely engrossed in an idea and where it leads, they aren’t likely to give two yuans for how it was conceptualized.
Continuum
Before mounting our high horse to tilt against this tedious expression, we are duty-bound to tip our hat to the people who first dragged it into the civic realm. Those who tried, late in the 20th century, to create a "continuum of care" for people in profound need-the isolated frail elderly, chronically homeless or mentally ill people, abandoned or runaway children-did the world too great a service to justify quarreling over their choice of terminology. They argued convincingly that people with many chronic needs should get a more prolonged and seamless kind of help than was available from typically discrete, short-term programs. They are still struggling to make their case, which has been warmly greeted by theorists but only grudgingly accommodated by government and philanthropy.
But meanwhile, oh, what has become of their word! Now every activity that lasts longer than a day and connects ever-so-glancingly with any other activity is officially a CONTINUUM, and wants to be discussed in the reverent tones reserved for things with Latin names. Ever since Einstein gave us a space-time continuum, we have had to bear the encroachment of exotics like school-to-work continua, perinatal continua, the Left-Right political continuum (what does that leave out, exactly?), and the labor-management continuum. In the advancing postmodern ooze, very few things have rigid borders any more (everything has parameters, but almost nothing owns up to perimeters). Consequently, everything sooner or later runs into everything else. Voilà! Continua all around!
Convener/Convening
Some may be surprised to learn that these are venerable words with an ancient pedigree. The Oxford English Dictionary traces CONVENER to at least the 16th century, and the noun CONVENING to the 18th. But you'd never know it from the howls of derision the two words summon from fed-up nonprofit and foundation officials. And in fact, the deriders are right: Although these words are correct English, they are pretentious and antiquated. (Indeed, not one usage from the OED is more recent than the mid-19th century, and nearly all are older.) In modern-day use, the word is nothing more than a posh disguise for ordinary meetings, conventions, and conferences. The self-styled CONVENER is simply whatever outfit hosts the meetings.
There is, in fact, something slightly pathetic about the bloated self-importance of the CONVENE clan. To insist on referring to the drudgery of meetings and conferences as if they were a summons to Buckingham Palace suggests a life starved for excitement. Said one foundation officer: "Whenever I'm invited to a 'convening,' I make it a point to decline. If they're calling it that, they must be desperate for participation, and that means it's the last place I'll want to be." The whole matter could not be put more succinctly.
Consensus/Consensus Building
True consensus is nice but elusive. CONSENSUS, in fact, is simply the Latin equivalent of the Greek sympátheia, "sympathy": It entails a real harmony of feeling and purpose-lovely to imagine, but hard to accomplish in your ordinary, workaday "action plan." What you want is a way of settling the inevitable disagreements. The result may be some set of parliamentary rules, perhaps. But true consensus? Not likely. [Try "process for making decisions".]
Structured/Crafted
The ancient verbs "arrange," "shape," "organize," "put together," and "prepare" are out, chucked aside among the dowdy detritus of the cool, corporate New Age. Today, everything with any structure at all is STRUCTURED, and anything that reflects the least craft must therefore be CRAFTED. The former word, at which The Oxford English Dictionary sniffs "not common until the 20th c.," is now so common that no writer who purports to be serious or sophisticated in the 21st c. can do without it. The word has passed the 1990s' ultimate test of chic: There is a brand of underwear called STRUCTURE, and as a standard of celebrity for high-fashion words, that is the equivalent of marrying royalty. The verb TO CRAFT-to which the OED's British editors give the ultimate brush-off "chiefly U.S."-has indeed all but overrun American usage, in every context from art to brewing (where "craft brewed" is now a euphemism for "has some detectable flavor").
Yet if CRAFT is "chiefly U.S.," it earns no official welcome on these shores, either. The authority on U.S. English, the generally lenient American Heritage Dictionary, has no patience with the word's most common meaning: to put something together cleverly or write effectively. The AHD delicately brands that sense of the word as a "usage problem," on the grounds that it portrays thinking and writing as, in the AHD's phrase, "a kind of handicraft," like stitching potholders or making angels out of toilet-paper rolls. A craft, in the most common sense, is a manual skill that can be taught and mastered by any reasonably coordinated person. In the fancier and more pretentious modern uses of CRAFT, that is the opposite of what's intended. Used in the fashionable way, the word defeats its own purpose. (An even older definition, "to deal evasively or deceptively," slips an unintentional self-revelation past modern writers who insist on "crafting" things.)
But the real problem with both these words has nothing to do with nuances of meaning. The problem is that they're everywhere, like overexposed sports celebrities with too many endorsement contracts. They have that starved look of the desperately publicity-hungry, a "hey-look-at-me" quality that has rubbed the shine off whatever glamour they once possessed. Anyone looking for a refreshing way to describe something that is nicely put together or carefully prepared would do well to try two genuinely unusual expressions sure to provoke surprise and admiration in any reader: "nicely put together" and "carefully prepared."
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