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Empowerment
Here is an example of that most pernicious of all forms of jargon: the ideological shibboleth. To establish one's bona fides as a person concerned about the poor, the disenfranchised, or even ordinary people in general, it is essential in every setting to use EMPOWERMENT - as early (and, in some circles, as often) as possible.
The coiners of EMPOWERMENT invested it with only the broadest meaning, perhaps to make it usable in nearly every context-or anyway, that has been the effect. Foundations now must be careful to empower grantees, communities, individual residents of those communities, voluntary and civic associations, the poor, those who help the poor, and even those who do not help the poor, but would if they were empowered. Scarcely a grant is made anymore without someone or something being solemnly empowered, normally with a timely infusion of money.
The word is a synonym, says the American Heritage Dictionary, for "authorize," but you wouldn't guess it from the way EMPOWER is used. People are not "authorized" by community development organizations, but they are apparently "empowered" in the hundreds of thousands. No one is "authorized" by public opinion polls, the Internet, charter schools, community policing, a Patient's Bill of Rights, civilian review boards, tax cuts, after-school programs, competition in the telecommunications industry, or community colleges. Yet every one of these things, and many more besides, has been described in recent public-policy or foundation writing as "empowering" people.
This EMPOWER-surge makes at least one thing clear: The American Heritage Dictionary has it wrong. In the ideological camps where EMPOWER is a ritual incantation, the word doesn't mean "authorize," it means "give people some ability to influence something they cannot already influence, or do something they cannot already do." But that definition is so broad that it can apply to almost anything that is not an absolute impediment. (One might argue, just to be churlish, that even an impediment empowers people to impede things.)
Try this exercise, which we might call an EMPOWER-outage: Find five or six instances of EMPOWER among recent memos and papers, and mentally blot them out. Then re-read the paper, with the EMPOWER switched off. Most times, the meaning won't have changed a whit. But the paper may grow shorter.
Engagement
“Foundations engage with faith-based institutions,” a senior foundation officer wrote, “in many ways and for many reasons.” “We will need further advocacy,” said another, “to engage the resources of the public sector on this issue.” “Someone needs to engage with the issue of developmental disabilities,” someone else wrote in a memo on education reform.
What kind of person uses ENGAGE this way? Military commanders do — but presumably most foundation officers aren’t contemplating the kind of lethal engagement typical of the battlefield. Social workers and psychiatrists may, when people withdraw and refuse to interact with others, try to “engage” them in the same sense that some of these writers evidently intended. In those lines of work, the word conveys an effort to make a connection, elicit a response, forge some kind of bond. But unless the writers actually come from one of those fields (a possibility), their use of ENGAGEMENT as a synonym for “speak to” or “grapple with” seems little more than insider code. It carries an unintentionally revealing hint of lonely supplication, a plea for connection, a plaintive yearning for some kind of contact with others.
The real problem, however, is not in the impression the word gives, but in the impressions it fails to give. Divorced from its therapeutic context, it could mean nearly anything at all — and one can hardly escape the suspicion that the writers being quoted had little idea what sort of “engagement” they actually had in mind. (The Oxford English Dictionary lists 19 different definitions for the verb TO ENGAGE, of which all but three are still in common use.) “Work with,” “solicit,” and “grapple with” might be possible synonyms of ENGAGE in the examples cited here. But even those words leave open volumes of interpretation. In truth, all three of the quoted sentences literally mean nothing more than “someone doing something with someone else.” The something to be done is left entirely to the imagination — or to the implicit understanding of the other members of the club.
Entity
In foundation-speak, this is usually just a synonym for "thing" or, at best, for "organization." "The study will determine the structure of a regionwide program, answering such questions as the scope of activity, the participating entities, and possible sources of funding." Outside the dusty realms of metaphysics, where it was born, ENTITY scarcely has a meaning at all (here's the best the Oxford English Dictionary could come up with: "a thing with distinct existence, as opposed to a quality or relation." Ah, well, thanks anyway.) For the non-metaphysician, at a minimum, it is mere noise, sound without meaning.
Environment
The 20th century was kind to this chronically amorphous word, anointing it with an –ism and giving it a precise meaning for the first time in its 400-year history in the English language. For most of those centuries, the word was so general it could be defined in only the vaguest terms: “the objects or the region surrounding anything” was the best The Oxford English Dictionary could do. The result was that anything from the dog house to Bauhaus to interstellar space was an environment of one kind or another. Even “surroundings” was a more specific word — at least it demanded some notion of who or what was being surrounded. Then came “environmentalism,” a movement with a scientific head on its shoulders. For a time, environmentalists almost managed to corral this vast word into a bounded pen of orderly meanings: natural habitats, atmospheric layers, clusters of interdependent organisms sharing a physical locale.
No matter; at its root, ENVIRONMENT could still mean just about anything, and its sheer wispiness has made it nearly irresistible to foundation writers who like to describe areas of activity without being forced to put clear boundaries around them. Instead of working in schools or teacher colleges, they prefer the instructional environment. Disdaining anything so limiting as the arts and humanities, they thrive in the cultural environment. Ill at ease among doctors and hospitals, they feel right at home in the health care environment. The beauty of the un-ism’d ENVIRONMENT is that everything belongs and nothing is excluded. Wander off the campuses and schoolyards, and you could travel for miles without ever leaving the “educational environment.” Are insurance companies part of the “cultural environment”? Are software developers part of the “health care environment”? Are all of them part of the “urban environment”? Of course!
Extrapolate
[The word EXTRAPOLATE's] useful life began, and largely remains, in the realm of statistics (the last great wellspring of metaphorical fads before the sensational debut of personal computing). EXTRAPOLATE describes a mathematical process by which one makes predictions about unobserved phenomena by carefully noting and quantifying patterns among observed events, and then assuming that those patterns continue beyond the range of observation. The word has made a grand tour of the social sciences (in which people never like to be caught guessing, but are perfectly willing to indulge in the practice if everyone agrees to call it EXTRAPOLATION).
A paper on social disintegration that once circulated in the foundation world offers this example of the sad fate of EXTRAPOLATE: "From the compounded anomie of Vietnam, Watergate, and Iran, it is possible to extrapolate to a gradual erosion of the social compact on which community, commerce, and democratic governance are founded." It's a defensible idea, no doubt. What it is not is extrapolation. It's a reasonable surmise based on no quantitative measures or demonstrated patterns. It is, in fact, nothing more than a (doubtless accurate) assertion that things are going to hell, and that the road to hell has lately acquired some handsome new milestones.
Entrepreneur
We hereby salute whatever 19th-century scholars of business and management first came up with this sexy new word for the heroic swashbuckling capitalist-the adventurer who thinks big and lives dangerously, who wagers all on a great commercial dream. Their ambitious mot exotique, drawn from the French word for "undertake" (entreprendre) does not, in English, mean "undertaker" (more's the pity, perhaps). It came out as the much dandier ENTREPRENEUR. In some circles, you get extra points for pronouncing the r's as if you were dislodging fish bones from the back of your throat.
In the mid-1800s, when the word's modern meaning made its debut (referring, at first, to the proprietor of a music hall or gambling establishment), it offered a colorful term for colorful people, a nice ?t of form to function. The original idea was indisputably so out-of-the-ordinary and specific as to deserve its own word. And when you want something colorful, there's really no source like the French. (Even a fleeting acquaintance with the 1960s sit-com The Addams Family will call to mind the explosively libidinous effect of French on the leisure classes. ENTREPRENEUR is, come to think of it, really the perfect word for a capitalist Gomez Addams.)
So what is this gorgeously ruffled word doing lurking about in philanthropy? It sailed over from Wall Street on an immigrant ship loaded with other business mumbo-jumbo. Just like capital and venture and return, the word ENTREPRENEUR has lately acquired the dignifying adjective SOCIAL (q.v.) and set about Doing Good. Result: A word once specially designed to describe Donald Trump or Ted Turner has lately been applied with equal verve to the founders of peace movements and soup kitchens.
By this route, the visionaries who inspire selflessness in others-so long as they go about it in any remotely unusual way-are now (get ready with the fish bones) social entrepreneurs. They are also civic entrepreneurs, public entrepreneurs, and, more rarely, philanthropic entrepreneurs. By recent standards, any effective leader who can finish the fiscal year on the safer side of ruin is promptly anointed an "entrepreneur," and takes a place, however uncomfortably, alongside the Rockefellers, the Morgans, and the Fords.
To be fair: The watering down of ENTREPRENEUR is not solely an offense of the nonprofit establishment. Even before the word swamped the immune system of the philanthropic world, it had already overrun the business libraries. "Like enterprise," says the Bloomsbury Good Word Guide (1997), "the noun ENTREPRENEUR is losing its traditional connotations of risk and initiative and is indiscriminately applied to any person who becomes self-employed or sets up a new small business." That presumably means that, somewhere in the entrepreneurial family portrait between Rupert Murdoch and Archbishop Tutu, if I look closely enough, I should be able to spot my dry-cleaner. |
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