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Disincent
It is hard to conceive the evil mind of whoever loosed DISINCENT on the world. It is uglier, more abstruse, and less expressive than almost any available alternative: "hinder," "dissuade," "deter," "daunt," or (most refreshingly) "scare off." It adds nothing to the rich vocabulary of discouragement with which all the social sciences are already ripe. Who could possibly have concocted this ghastly word, and what was their wicked design? Here, at last, is useful employment for conspiracy buffs.
Dive/Drill Down
Someone who read the earlier essays in this series wrote us to comment on the burgeoning popularity of the term DIVES, an expression the reader described as a “corporate buzz-word for auditing (deep) and surveying (shallow).” That was in 2003, by which time the expressions DEEP and SHALLOW DIVE were beginning to turn up well outside the civic world’s accounting and auditing departments. Little by little, nonprofit organizations — especially those engaged in research and public policy — were beginning to conduct “deep dives,” apparently in hopes of surfacing sub-oceanic layers of sunken truth beneath every murky topic.
Here’s a case of a metaphor rich with unintended meaning. The consequence of any dive is that you end up soaking your head. The consequence of a shallow dive is bound to be far worse. I’m no accountant, but I would have thought that, in the world of business, the whole idea of taking a dive would be considered regrettable. Paying experts to help you do so would thus seem doubly ill-advised. We all know of a few enterprising companies that managed to dive without any professional assistance whatsoever. Several, of course, did pay handsomely for the privilege. Either way, shouldn’t people who labor all day in pursuit of the public good be able to do so with their heads held safely above water?
I feel obliged, in this context, to bring up the related expression to DRILL DOWN. Like the DEEP DIVE, this oil-industry metaphor is meant to invoke a search for buried treasure — in this case through the penetrating intelligence of the analyst’s drill-bit mind. “The proposal becomes less attractive,” says a policy institute about some employment plan, “when we drill down to the funding and administrative implications.” “This report,” promises another organization, “drills down into the common approaches to universal health care coverage for children.” The main problem with both the diving and drilling metaphors is their unearned claims of profundity. The ordinary expressions “take a close look,” “examine carefully,” or “perform a detailed analysis” say the same things, but without brashly suggesting that one is piercing geological layers or plumbing the salty deep. Those are simply not claims that writers are well advised to make for themselves. The reader, not the writer, should be the one to determine whether one’s work is truly deep, penetrating, profound, or groundbreaking. To claim such things for oneself is just asking for trouble.
Diversity
I was, for a time, loosely affiliated with an arts organization whose board included a crusading civil rights lawyer, a professor of Latin American studies, a strait-laced banker who was also an ordained minister, and two wealthy civic leaders (one gay, one straight), each of whom contributed serious money to the other’s political enemies. A well-meaning foundation declined to consider a proposal from this organization because, an officer gently advised, the board had a “diversity problem.” The unspoken meaning, which was beyond dispute, was that all these assorted human beings, of different philosophies, hues, and sexual identities, were men.
Now, that was a problem, arguably enough. But a “diversity problem”? There are U.N. commissions more homogeneous than that board. It would have been an unconscionable gaffe to describe this as a “female problem,” but it would have been vastly more accurate.
The foundation never inquired about the many ways these folks differed from one another, or about the interesting effects their differences had on the arts group’s activities. “Diversity,” in the ordinary sense of the word, wasn’t really the officer’s concern. The foundation’s leaders believed, for reasons of both principle and practicality, that boards should not be all-male. Good for them. Unfortunately, they refused to say so. Bad for them.
The foundation officer, like many of her colleagues, kept a “diversity table” on organizations applying for grants. It showed the composition of boards and staff by gender, race, and ethnicity. But the words “gender, race, and ethnicity” were almost never used. Perhaps that’s because they are controversial, and the foundation lacked the courage of its convictions. If so, more’s the pity. But another, less damning explanation might simply be that this specific sense of DIVERSITY was part of the family code, and outsiders were not expected to know (or, sadder still, expected to care) that it referred strictly to three very important things.
Ironically, using words in such an idiosyncratic, private way raises a troubling question: When any group of people comes to speak in a language that most people are unlikely to understand, how “diverse” can that group really be? |
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