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Maximize
The verb TO MAXIMIZE suffers, like many grandiloquent expressions, from a kind of inflation, being applied thoughtlessly to far smaller things than it is meant to describe. In that respect, it is cousin to words like “universal,” “brilliant,” “comprehensive,” and the oiliest of the lot, “holistic.” It’s rare to see these words used with anywhere near the expansiveness for which they were intended. A “holistic” cure usually addresses two or three aspects of a problem, but almost never its entirety — to which the Greek prefix holo refers. (Compare with “holocaust,” a total immolation, or “hologram,” where all dimensions are visible.) Similarly, “comprehensive” programs usually deal with a handful of related things, but not all related things (which would quickly get us to the galaxy’s edge, and beyond).
Likewise MAXIMIZE, which ought to mean achieving the utmost — the living end, so to speak. To “maximize” your return on an investment, you should end up immeasurably wealthy, or at least you should end up with every possible dime that investment could ever yield. (The Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition of MAXIMUM is “the greatest of all the values of which a variable or a function is capable.”) Most investors these days are lucky if they get any return at all, but almost no one ever gets everything that’s possible, and most smart investors aren’t foolish enough to expect that. Far too many people, unfortunately, are foolish enough to say that they expect that — or worse, that they can deliver it — a practice that makes the speaker seem injudicious at best.
Mechanisms
It's hard to say, frankly, just what this word is supposed to mean when it turns up in a context like the following: "The objective of this program will be to create mechanisms by which government, service providers, and community organizations can develop new methods of serving the target population." It may be that MECHANISMS, in this sentence, is simply a euphemism for "ways" ("the objective...will be to find ways in which...") but it hints at something more specific than that. "Forums," perhaps-gathering places where they can talk about "new methods"? Or maybe newly formed institutions or types of contracts? The trouble with MECHANISMS in this context-an extremely common context, to be sure-is that it says very little but appears to designate something very important. Either it is misleading, by pretending to say more than it says, or it is confusing, by trying to say something whose meaning an ordinary reader could scarcely guess.
Metrics
Many Americans still admit to being flummoxed by hectares, litres, kilometres, and all the decimal exotica cooked up in the smoke-filled salons of the European continent. But sorting steres from deciares is child's play compared with navigating modern civilization's other metric system: the cult of METRICS in the world of social policy and programs.
Change one or two words, and the following sentence will nestle snugly into the writing of any branch of the human services: "The failure of the mental health industry to devise adequate metrics to capture long-term outcomes has resulted in confusion as to appropriate timing and levels of intervention." The phrase "to devise adequate metrics" is apparently the universal choice to replace the hopelessly outdated and déclassé verb "to measure." We no longer count anything in the digital age. We now devise metrics.
"Without metrics of success," says a recent foundation paper, "it is impossible to say with certainty whether the results of neighborhood redevelopment in the past 20 years justify the level of investment." The sentence is remarkable not so much for its use of METRICS-it would be much more remarkable to find a piece of foundation writing that does not use the term-but for its specific application to the field of neighborhood development. Here, one might have supposed, is a branch of American philanthropy and social policy that is among the most metricked civic activities in history.
Neighborhood development groups in the past 20 or 30 years have made an art of counting new houses, refurbished apartments, reclaimed blocks, numbers of investors and lenders, square feet of renovated commercial space, and (with a more fanciful standard of reckoning) the number of jobs added to the neighborhood employment base. Compared with neighborhood development, only professional baseball is more awash in metrics. So what more is the author of the quoted sentence looking for?
The key is in the seemingly innocent word "success." In modern philanthropic usage, what distinguishes METRICS from mere measurement is that the fancier word gauges success-or, as the mental health writer would have it, "long-term outcomes." Metrics are contemporary social policy's equivalent of the Philosopher's Stone - an elusive but potent medium that transforms the base metal of mere results into the unalloyed gold of "long-term outcomes." Building houses and treating illnesses are fine, but will they permanently solve the deeper problems? Seek ye the metric that will pierce that mystery. And be prepared for a long search.
(To be fair to the alchemists who sought the Philosopher's Stone: They may have been a little confused about the limits of chemistry, but at least they knew for certain what gold was. The same cannot be said for those seeking today's "long-term outcomes.")
Striving for better and better ways of recognizing success and failure is a mark of excellence. Foundations can be justly proud of their pursuit of that goal. But showering the field with METRICS, and then arrogating to the term all the powers of divine wisdom, hardly advances the cause. At best, the fruits of human services will someday be gauged over longer time periods, and units of comparison may come to fit more and more aspects of human progress. But even then, the methods will still be those of measurement, plain and simple, and the resulting standards of "success" will still be partial, relative, and open to debate. The use of METRICS perfumes the whole enterprise with a false whiff of approaching finality. It seems to imply that someday mere measurement will become obsolete, replaced with something more conclusively scientific and indisputable. Around that superstition, with its gilded vocabulary of metrics and outcomes, gathers a new generation of cowled alchemists gibbering their way through the Information Age.
Modality
“The ineluctable modality of the visible,” Stephen Dedalus thinks to himself early in James Joyce’s Ulysses, as he walks along the beach and ponders snippets of classical and German philosophy. In the novel, this moment of private philosophizing is supposed to portray the introverted, over-scholarly mind of a lonely and confused young man. But the lofty word modality and its echoes of intellectual greatness seem to have captivated the 20th-century imagination almost from the instant Ulysses found its way into print.
The word belongs, and is probably highly useful, in lectures on philosophy or (more recently) the clinical professions. But in the last few decades, MODALITY has been gaining steam in political, civic, and philanthropic circles, as a pretentious stand-in for “method.” This use, some say, was made fashionable in the 1970s by then–Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was exceedingly fond of it. (“The new word that is constantly being heard here is MODALITIES,” The New Yorker reported from the Paris peace talks in 1970.) Now it’s common to find papers on all sorts of topics where MODALITIES are the order of the day — including one on employment policy, for example, in which a section begins, “The program pursues its goals through two primary modalities.”
Why that author didn’t write “we do our work in two ways” is puzzling. The simpler wording would not only have been easier to read and understand, but it would have directed our attention toward the work, rather than sending us scurrying to the dictionary to make sense of MODALITIES. (Actually, the dictionary wouldn’t help much. The word has so many meanings that this is the best The Oxford English Dictionary could do for a concise definition: “Those aspects of a thing which relate to its mode, or manner or state of being, as distinct from its substance or identity.”)
Why would a foundation have written that it seeks an “expansion in the modalities of shelter and housing”? Why not just say “more kinds of shelter and housing,” or “more ways of providing” it, and then save your meaty vocabulary for the description of the new approach to housing, whatever it is? Why would a civil rights organization explain that it does not limit its work “solely to the modality of litigation”? It could have written “solely to litigation” and left out the superfluous MODALITIES altogether. The worst effect of these solemn phrases is to draw our attention to the authors’ thought processes and their complex approach to the “modes” of their trade, rather than to whatever argument they are trying to make. It’s as if the writer is subtly saying: “Yes, OK, our work is important, and we’re going to tell you about it in a minute, but first let us make a really important point: The elegant way we analyze our field — the sophisticated categories into which we sort our interests, and the fancy names we give the categories — now there is something truly marvelous!”
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