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Paradigm
Foundations can hardly bear primary blame for the relentless spread of this muddy word, which by now has oozed all over the vocabulary of the social and natural sciences, philosophy, art criticism, business management, and just about everything else. Its popularity has grown in direct proportion to the watering down of its meaning, which was never exactly concrete to start with, and has grown thinner with every new use. By now the word is indistinguishable from more honest (if less thrillingly Greek) terms like "pattern," "structure," "formula," or "model."
Philosophers may still retain some rigor in their use of PARADIGM. It was their laboratory, after all, from which the word first escaped, never to be recaptured. T.S. Kuhn gave it a seemingly permanent mystique in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, when he used it to describe the web of accepted theories through which scientists normally regard their subject. By Kuhn's definition, a paradigm is the set of inherited preconceptions, the "glass darkly" through which even the most scrupulous inquirer habitually views the world. When someone shatters the glass-as Einstein did with his theory of relativity, for example-everyone is forced to ask questions differently, and to view the challenges of science and philosophy in a new way. Presto: a PARADIGM SHIFT.
It must have been obvious from the start that this word, thus invested with so spectacular a meaning, would be purloined by everyone with a plan destined to change the world. Nowadays we have a "welfare paradigm," a "hospital paradigm," the versatile "12-step paradigm," "urban paradigms" of various shapes and colors, and "market paradigms" too numerous to reckon. All of them, according to some observer or other, urgently need to shift. These metaphors and models and what-have-you are all related to Kuhn's original idea, no doubt-the kinds of poor, distant cousins who show up in Dickens or Balzac novels demanding bed and board. But any kinship with Kuhn is so tenuous, and the relevance of the fancy word is so diluted, that most uses of PARADIGM today are mere posturing, intended to flatter the user more than to inform the reader.
In some people's view (we claim no license to judge), Kuhn wasn't being all that precise himself. "The notion of paradigm," writes science historian Roy Porter in The Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought, "was too vague. The term seemed to be used to describe both whole sciences and individual concepts within them." Yet whatever its original shortcomings, Kuhn's idea was a dazzle of clarity compared with the uses the word has been put to in modern public policy and philanthropy. Because people in those fields often hope to change inherited ideas, practically anything they touch turns to paradigms. In attacking the "insurance paradigm" behind Social Security, for example, a foundation writer apparently rejected the more accurate words "analogy" or "model" in favor of something that sounded more perfectly destined to shift. By borrowing Kuhn's word, the writer may also have hoped to dress up a simple reform plan as a scientific revolution.
Similarly, by decrying the "educational paradigm" behind employment training, a writer seemed to be arguing simply that such training should not be done by schools, or in classrooms. Seeking a "new leadership paradigm," a foundation trade group probably just wanted to find new forms of leadership, or new management styles. Both phrases provided a thunder of gravitas, yet neither meant anything special.
Still, it must be said that in none of these cases was the word wrongly used. Its general definition, apart from any special uses in philosophy, is so vague that it applies to almost anything. The Greek roots are simply the prefix para, for "alongside," affixed to the root deik, for "show" or "teach." Anything that's explained or taught with reference to anything else probably fits the basic concept.
Small wonder that little or no clarity has come from that morass. For anyone genuinely intent on a scientific revolution, Rule No. 1 might be: Find a more concrete word with which to state your case, and shift away from PARADIGM.
Parameter
At home in its proper field, PARAMETER means a mathematical constant that can be assigned different values and, once assigned such a value, will influence the behavior of other variables. This would seem a sufficiently arcane concept to prevent outsiders from borrowing the term idly. But poor PARAMETER, like the virtuous twin in a story of confused identities, was soon taken for its poorer brother PERIMETER-meaning a border. In no time, the well-bred statistical term found itself adrift and friendless in the mean streets of foreign towns.
Now, for example, a foundation paper can boast of giving its subject "the necessary parameters within which to examine [a topic] and explore its major elements." Sorry, wrong -METER. As it happens, some of the elements that the paper explored might actually have turned out to be parameters in the true sense. But the intended meaning in the quoted sentence (revealed by the telltale use of "within") is clearly "border." Events may be governed by parameters, but they don't live within them. By reaching needlessly for a loftier term, the writer of the paper simply missed, and landed...well, outside the perimeter.
Partnership
The pretense of many foundations to be "partners" of their grantees is at best a charming absurdity. The kinds of "partnerships" that result when one partner has a billion-dollar balance sheet and the other an annual five-figure deficit are the stuff of Divorce Court reruns. But our brief here involves not the idea of partnership, lopsided as that may be in this context, but the word-and especially its more feeble relative, the verb to PARTNER.
In the idealistic world of civic and charitable institutions, PARTNERSHIP has lately taken on the rosy mystique of the more mawkish fairy stories, with the nonprofit grantees in the role of Cinderella. "In this program," says one princely foundation, "we invite our program partners to share in more than the funding of individual initiatives, but in a whole range of supportive interactions." The first mystery in that sentence is the peculiar phrase "program partners," which turns out to be a euphemism for "grantees." The next is those unspecified "supportive interactions," in which a jaundiced eye might detect a "come-up-and-see-my-etchings" quality. But we have no time for such prurience here. The problem with this image of partnership is not so much that the intentions might not be honorable, but that the label is so broad that one can scarcely guess what intentions might be crouching behind it.
This ambiguity would be harmless enough, on a par with the gauzy endearments in Valentine cards, were it not for the inflated expectations to which the word gives rise on all sides. The expansive use of PARTNERSHIP now in vogue commonly implies that the "partners" share all manner of confidences and dreams, shoulder one another's burdens, support each other in sickness and health, and so on. (In actual experience, veterans of such partnerships most often come away sadder but wiser about what happens to love when money steps in the door.)
The surprising fact is that, common as this blushing sentimentality has become, it most often goes unexamined.
Dictionaries and law books tend to take a far more detached and mathematical view of PARTNERSHIP, emphasizing explicit agreements in which control, expenses, profits, and losses are all divided in fixed proportion to each partner's share in the capital and risk of the enterprise. That approach is true to the word's roots-from the Latin partior, "to divide" -the same word that gave us "partition." In this traditional sense, still common in the making of business agreements, the partnership consists not in the sharing of "supportive interactions," but in the precise dividing of material interests, with each side knowing exactly how much of the common enterprise it owns and where its privileges and obligations lie. Strong fences, you might say, make good partners.
One sign that foundations take a more whimsical view of these matters is the popularity of the verb TO PARTNER, a breezy coinage rarely heard in the law offices where business deals are hammered out. In The Oxford English Dictionary, which traces the verb back to Shakespeare, nearly every example of its use refers either to light romance or to sport. Where large sums of money are involved, it seems, common sense would seek more concrete terms. So should foundations.
Persons
For reasons no doubt buried in the ancient political sensitivities of the human services, it is considered woefully déclassé to refer to human beings as "people." "Emergency shelters in New York provided accommodation [you'd never catch them "giving a bed"] to 35,000 persons last year," a paper recently announced. Why PERSONS? Would anyone, in conversation, ever have said that? "This budget assumes four sessions per week, serving an average 30 persons each." PERSONS? Go figure. Evidently the term "people" takes too little account of the dignity of those being helped. Sorry: assisted.
Planful
A trendy antonym for “careless,” “haphazard” and “sloppy,” planful has taken the public-interest world by storm (though it’s been an orderly, responsible, and deliberate storm, to be sure). The person who first brought PLANFUL to my attention perfectly summed up what makes this piece of bland piety so annoying: “Prayerful, OK. Merciful, I hope. But please, let’s not imbue the relatively straightforward art / science of planning with too much mystery.”
Mystery is exactly what the users of PLANFUL are trying to conjure — though what they end up with is more often self-parody. Indispensable as a good plan may be, it does not fill anything except the mind of the planners (and, if it’s successful, maybe the minds of the people who act on the plan). A perfectly disastrous activity can nonetheless be stuffed like a Christmas goose with well-meaning plans — as many indeed are. The telling fact about PLANFUL is that, although it is often applied to important activities that are supposed to benefit lots of people, it actually describes only the people and process behind the activities — the folks whose cogitating and deliberating went into the plan. While seeming to describe results, it actually says nothing about them, preferring instead to dwell on preparation and process.
Those things are important, but only because they help bring about the intended results, and only to the extent that those results are actually desirable. For most people, the fact that something is well planned may be reassuring, but hardly decisive. Those who use PLANFUL want us to believe that the very act of planning is somehow deeply fulfilling, a kind of shiatsu for the body politic. For them, the word claims a place in the hushed and smoky temple of virtues, in the same pew as “joyful,” “bountiful,” and even that advertising favorite “flavorful” — words that imply an abundance of inner riches, something brimming with metaphysical qualities of immeasurable value. There are no doubt planners who derive that kind of satisfaction from their work, and we envy them. For the rest of us, however, the proof of the “flavorful” is in the tasting, and the best thing you can say about any public activity is not what it was full of, but whether it got anything done.
Proactive
This phony word, a creature of the 1970s, was invented to contrast with "reactive," as in: "This program takes a proactive approach to sexually transmitted diseases, teaching prevention and informing young people of their risks." A reactive approach to sexually transmitted diseases would surely be a day late, and the delay might well be deadly. But does PROACTIVE really express what makes this program commendable? Assuming the word expresses anything at all-a tenuous but defensible assumption-it is a poor substitute for "preventive," which is, we are told, exactly what the sexually transmitted disease program really is.
Sometimes, though, PROACTIVE is employed not to describe something preventive, but merely something done in advance of trouble. In that case, the word that writers are seeking might be "preparatory" or "pre-emptive," or even just "early." In some cases, the writer is trying to say that someone should take the initiative. The defenders of PROACTIVE, however, refuse to surrender to "preventive" or "pre-emptive" or "taking initiative" or anything else, because most of the time they want a word that means none of those things, but that really just means "aggressive."
Provide / Receive
This is simply the verb equivalent of "funding." No one wants to "get" or "give" anything. It seems too ordinary, not to say materialistic. But they would be pleased to RECEIVE, and feel duty-bound to PROVIDE. It's another example of how a well-meaning writer inadvertently takes a plain idea and turns it into something pompous, without the least intention of doing so. |
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