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Operationalize
Those who set out to cure jargon and other self-important speech take their place in a humblingly long line of earlier scolds-a lineage stretching back at least to Aristophanes-who had in their day no more success than this essay is likely to have now. The prospect of success, in fact, never seems dimmer than when one confronts American jargon's answer to Original Sin, the perennial habit of attaching -ize to everything in sight (maximize, strategize, localize, institutionalize, prioritize, and on and on). In his devastating 1975 essay "Ize Front," the venerable NBC journalist Edwin Newman complained: "-ize is thought to have a businesslike ring or, what in some cases is just as good, to sound technical.... What those who use -ize overlook is that it is usually unnecessary and always dull-it is a leaden syllable that imposes monotony on the language by making many words sound the same.... I have been told that a television news broadcaster in Alabama announced that a deputy sheriff, killed in the line of duty, would be funeralized the following day, and there is, unfortunately, no reason to doubt it."
Despite Newman's best efforts (and his application of methods from outright ridicule to gentle erudition and literate wit), -ize is still with us a quarter-century after the funeralization of that Alabama deputy. As a result, we continue to endure sentences like this one, which appeared recently in a foundation publication: "Long-standing museums [are] seeking to reconceptualize their permanent collections as civic resources." How are we to suppose these museums "conceptualized" their collections before? As matters of civic indifference? As exclusive playthings of the pampered elite? As parasites upon the body politic? The sentence doesn't just confuse the reader, it invites all sorts of unflattering speculation.
Among the worst of the evilize is OPERATIONALIZE, merely because it enjoys some of the simplest and most obvious synonyms in this whole essay. Most of the time, you can easily funeralize all six windy syllables and substitute "carry out," "work on," or simply "do." For example: "The next phase will be for the coalition to operationalize the elements of its plan." Try "do what it planned." "The challenge will be in operationalizing the six steps to financial independence." Try "taking the six steps." "Having carefully negotiated a consensus process, the more difficult challenge will be to operationalize it." Once you fix the dangling participle at the beginning of that sentence, you can substitute "carry it out."
The problem with OPERATIONALIZE is not just that it's ugly, but that it is so sprawling a word-like an ill-planned building with too many additions-that it suggests something complicated, demanding, and obscure. It tries to awe the reader with its sheer unruliness, as if it contains so many ideas that it might be dangerous to unleash them all. Yet the closer you look, the more likely the thing is to mean nothing more than "do." It's a Texas-size word that, as Texan Lyndon B. Johnson once said of some Lone Star poseur, turns out to be "all hat and no cattle."
Outreach to/On the same page
The person who wrote to object to "the same page" and the verb "outreach to" has art and beauty among his job responsibilities. That may explain some of his objection to these shopworn phrases. Neither expression is beautiful, to put it kindly, and both tend to be used artlessly, to the point of tedium. But to my eye, those are the worst things that can be said about either phrase. The verb "to outreach," for example, turns up in the Oxford English Dictionary in its currently trendy meaning -- "to reach out, as if with arms extended" -- in a 200-year-old quotation from the English poet Robert Southey (whose place in the pantheon of art and beauty is surely nowhere near the top tier). The phrase seems a little corny even in Southey's usage, and is surely much more so today, now that the advertising jingle "reach out and touch someone" has made the phrase something of a mantra among the touchy-feely set. Yet however much one might object to the phrase's gooey sentimentality, it has been around a long time and means something relatively clear, and most people recognize that meaning as soon as they see or hear the phrase. Tiresome, certainly. But jargon? I'd vote No.
Likewise, "on the same page." I can't find an origin for the phrase -- which could mean that it's so old and common that it has never seemed to require special note. It surely predates the computer age; it seems most obviously to refer to a group of people who are trying to follow along in their separate copies of a single publication -- as in a classroom, a church, or a musical ensemble. There is nothing particularly "tech" about it, high or low. It's just a metaphor -- overused, to be sure -- for people trying to work together on a common text (or, by metaphorical extension, a common set of ideas or principles or facts). The phrase has an annoying habit of turning up almost every time people are working together on anything -- to the point where you fear you might scream the next time you see it. That is an aesthetic problem of the first order. But the meaning of the phrase is neither obscure nor fuzzy, and therefore not on the same page with real jargon.
Ownership
Here’s a rare and exotic species: a case of two-headed jargon. This one word manages to have a separate, trendy meaning for each side of the American ideological divide. Social activists of the left like to dwell on whether ideas and activities are genuinely “owned” by people who are expected to take part in them. Phrasemakers on the right have a completely different twist on the same word. For many conservatives, OWNERSHIP is the antidote to “dependency” and “passivity,” and thus an OWNERSHIP SOCIETY is the prescribed antidote to entitlements (what others call “safety nets”). Two meanings, both evasive, bundled into one seemingly ordinary word.
I have no intention of strolling onto the ideological minefield separating the two camps, except to point out that both, in their different ways, have a tendency to use OWNERSHIP to deflect attention away from practicalities and focus it instead on the motivations and thought processes behind whatever is actually going on. On the right, for example, the shibboleth of OWNERSHIP is supposed to conjure an entire system of values and social-science theory, but in the process it also neatly glosses over some of the more difficult decisions raised by those same values and theories — like what things people ought to own, how much help they should receive in coming up with the purchase price, or even what the “owners” would actually end up with under any given proposal, other than the psychological satisfactions of possession.
There is no more frankness in the way the word is used on the political left, although the context is almost completely different. When community organizers and people interested in social policy talk about OWNERSHIP of an idea or activity, they are usually trying to describe a high degree of personal attachment to whatever is under discussion. “Community organizers,” says a treatise on employment, “need to do more than simply inform residents about the opportunities that are available to them; they need to help residents gain some ownership over the choices these opportunities present.” Will ownership change the way the residents actually make the choices, or the choices they make? We aren’t told. “The program seeks to promote an ownership of traditional art forms among members of the community,” says a brochure. Assuming that members of the community are not expected to walk off with the paintings, what effect is this ownership supposed to have on them? Again, no clue.
In this sense of the word, the “owners” are supposed to be persuaded that some concept, or endeavor or whatever it is, is the fruit of their own thought or an extension of their personal commitment. That kind of emotional attachment can be valuable, as when the goal is to motivate people to work hard for a cause, or to promote an idea to others. But in those cases, indeed in nearly all cases outside the realm of pure psychology, the “ownership” per se isn’t ultimately all that important. The word is a stand-in, a kind of understudy, for the real piece of information that most people would want to know straight away: what behavior the supposed “ownership” is meant to enable or motivate, and what rewards it’s supposed to bring. Fixating on OWNERSHIP deprives us of that very information, and thus of a sense of anything getting done.
Activists and public-policy types aren’t the only people who abuse OWNERSHIP in this sense. Management experts and consultants are unwholesomely fond of the word and tend to use it in much the same way as the social reformers. “The customer-service ethic,” a management outfit wrote to one of its clients, “demands total ownership by frontline staff, rather than a top-down approach.” 6 In management circles, it must be said, the shift of focus toward the warm-and-fuzzy “ownership” of things, and away from the practical consequences, may not be altogether benign. One typical result of greater “ownership” of some set of goals is that people are then expected to work harder to accomplish them. It’s understandable that managers might prefer to package this as “ownership” rather than “harder work,” but once the employees figure it out, they are unlikely to take their newfound ownership quite so warmly.
That is equally true of a similar trendy word, INTERNALIZE, which tends to be used in much the same way as the verb TO OWN. At a large New York consulting firm a few years ago, top managers sought to instill the firm’s “core values” in its employees by asking them to come up with events and activities that would help one another “internalize the values.” The values themselves were simple and uncontroversial enough (diligence, respect, teamwork, the usual pieties) but the promotional events and activities quickly became gimmicky — not to mention a burden on people who were already clocking long hours in the office. It wasn’t long before at least one employee dreamt of submitting a resignation memo with the heading, “You can take this job and internalize it.” |
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