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Targeting
To those who nowadays consider the verb TO TARGET indispensable in all contexts, it will come as some surprise that the current sense of the verb did not exist until the 1970s, the decade that also gave us Debbie Boone and the energy crisis. The 1969 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary lists "target" solely as a noun. The Oxford English Dictionary's 1971 edition lists only the antiquated meanings of "shielded" or "marked for execution." Then sometime in the Nixon and Carter years, TARGETING blasted out of the Pentagon like a runaway rocket and landed smack in the fad-making salons of Madison Avenue. It's been ubiquitous ever since.
TARGETING illustrates a kind of Gresham's Law6 of jargon: Bad words drive good words out of circulation. The popularity of TARGETING has all but obliterated the nice old-fashioned Saxon word "aiming," largely because the newer word sounds more complicated (and, not incidentally, more military). Those who like their writing to seem tough and imposing will always prefer three bellicose syllables over two quiet ones. Thus the cumbersome neologism nudges out the plain, easy word every time.
Yet apart from its pseudo-military cachet, TARGETING offers hardly any improvement over "aiming." It does, admittedly, lend itself to the adjective TARGETED-as in the many "targeted populations" who have become metaphorical bull's-eyes for the guided missiles of modern philanthropy. But TARGETED is an inherently ambiguous word: When you aim a sharp projectile at someone (your "target population," you might say), which one has been TARGETED? The projectile or the intended victim? The fact is, the word is sloppy enough to mean both things at once.
Do we need TARGETING and TARGETED? In the typical sentence, "Services are targeted at three populations," it's clear that "aimed" would do very nicely. But what to do with the sentence "Target populations include inner-city youth, the homeless, and those leaving the criminal-justice system." Here, the word "target" is actually fine-but in its original form and sense. It's a noun, and should be used that way. "The program's targets are inner-city youth, the homeless, etc." The verb is not only avoidable most of the time, but actually inferior to the simpler alternatives.
Technical Assistance
Meant originally as a counterpart to FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE (itself a euphemism for "grants" or "loans"), the parallel phrase TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE has the advantage of designating helpful acts by foundations that do not entail the transfer of money, but may involve a special skill or professional service. "We will provide financial assistance in the first year," says one foundation planning paper, "and follow with technical assistance in Years 2 and 3." No harm there: When that juxtaposition is the main point, the two phrases are apt enough. But when the purpose is to describe actual activity, the phrase TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE conveys almost no useful information. Other than writing a check, what isn't technical assistance?
In actual use, the phrase (known these days almost everywhere by its initials) normally seems to mean "advice"-and not always "technical" advice, either. But somewhere in the lower bureaus of philanthropy's sensitivity constabulary, someone in charge of official humility must have deemed "advice" too condescending. TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE, conveniently, sounds more like a visit from the electrician-cool, professional, all-in-a-day's-work, no reflection on the customer's essential savvy.
The trouble with this humility is that it's misplaced. When foundations provide technical assistance, it is because they believe they have, or can purchase, important knowledge that grantees lack. The premise of most technical assistance - giving advice or instruction to those who need it - is nothing to be ashamed of. Most often, in fact, "technical assistance" assignments come wrapped in the broader objective of knowledge transfer-itself a buzz-phrase, admittedly, but one that rarely applies to a visit from the electrician. If the goal is transferring knowledge, then the process is that of teaching or advising, not of performing a "technical" task. The practitioner is therefore a teacher, consultant, trainer, or adviser.
So "instruction," "consulting," "training," or "advice" are all better words than the murky phrase TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE, because they are more precise and more ordinary. Any of those words will convey, in reasonably concrete and understandable terms, just who is supposed to do what for the grantee. By contrast, TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE treats that essential information as practically a state secret.
Among these four common words, circumstances will normally dictate which to choose. "Training" and "consulting" are most often used to refer to the work of professionals-teachers, trainers, and consultants-who transfer knowledge for a living. Some technical assistance is in fact intended to be delivered by such professionals, and in those cases, "training" or "consulting" would be the best choice - as in, "The proposed grant provides money to hire a consultant" or "to send employees to a training program." In other cases, though, the intent is not to hire a professional, but to introduce grantees to people who simply have useful expertise or experience to share. In those cases, the plain English word "advice" is made to order.
Throughput
Born in the corridors of industrial engineering before World War II, THROUGHPUT traveled back and forth a few times between descriptive neologism and itinerant metaphor. After some years of disciplined life describing the pace and scope of work on old-fashioned assembly lines, or the delivery potential of fuel systems, the word made a mid-life career change and became a journeyman metaphor in the infant computer industry. It was such a hit there that it quickly grew to be a precisely defined technical term in its new field, infused with a tight new range of meanings.
That was the word's first definitional leap, but it was a small one. Its original meaning was in most senses still intact: The processing of information really was a new application of the ideas of productive engineering and fuel delivery; the new meaning was not a metaphor but simply a new use for the original concept. Instead of people assembling machinery or pipes delivering fuel, machines were moving and assembling information. The point, though, remained a combination of transportation, assembly, and production.
But the computer pioneers soon lost control of the word (as of most of their once-specialized vocabulary, starting with THROUGHPUT's parents, INPUT and OUTPUT). THROUGHPUT is now the universal metaphor for any interval between the moment anything is put into anything else and the moment it re-emerges, presumably altered.
Tools
Someone (who may be watching too much television) recently opined that the word TOOLS suddenly became ubiquitous when beefy construction workers started showing up as the stars of TV commercials. All at once, it was alleged, every useful thing was re-christened a TOOL, and any collection of practical methods, standard procedures, or handy resources was fashionably described as a TOOL BELT or TOOLKIT.
We harbor no doubts about the corrupting power of TV commercials over all intellectual pursuits in this country. And certainly tools has become unbearably trendy at the moment, for whatever reason. That is sufficient to make it a cliché, surely. But it's hard to imagine an argument for condemning this humble word as jargon. Those who use it are simply making the (refreshingly honest) acknowledgement that their favorite techniques, processes, and rigmaroles are really just means to an end, and are only as good as the person who uses them.
The word is sometimes used, it's true, to refer evasively to some collection of things that are supposedly useful but conveniently unidentified. But that same charge can be leveled against many other plural words and phrases like "methods," "procedures," and the ubiquitous BEST PRACTICES. The only real reason to avoid tools is that practically everyone is using it, and (like the TV commercials that may have boosted its popularity) it is quickly becoming tiresome. |
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