First Draft #25: a newsletter on public language
“Reimagine”; the art of conversation; good apologies; "laser-like focus"
Jargon buster: Reimagine
Rishi Sunak wants us to "reimagine" maths. The boss of Jaguar wants us to "reimagine" posh cars. One chief executive would like us to "reimagine sewage".
Corporate executives think the word reimagine is good because they like its more poetic root, imagine. It's a fair instinct. To imagine is to conjure an idea; to paint a picture in the mind's eye. The word is more vivid than merely to think. It is leagues better than its schmaltzy American cousin, visualise.
To imagine is good. To re-imagine must, therefore, be better. Right?
Wrong. First, as with all jargon, reimagine is painfully overused. There is nothing on earth that you could think of that hasn't, at some point, been reimagined. Plastic. Mortality. Seaside resorts. Like any cliché, familiarity corrodes meaning.
Second, it lacks agency. To reimagine something means, by definition, that someone somewhere before you has already done the hard part. They imagined the thing in the first place. The recipe is theirs. You've reheated the leftovers.
Finally - and crucially - it obfuscates. When people say "reimagine" what they really mean is "change". It is a fancy word to convey a simple idea. If the change is good, using a fancy verb is redundant. If it's bad, your euphemism will only confirm people's distrust.
This was pointed out recently in a brilliant speech by the conductor, Sir Simon Rattle. At a Sunday night concert at the Barbican, Sir Simon took aim at recent funding cuts by the Arts Council and the BBC to classical music programmes. Those on the receiving end of cuts, he said, have been told to "reimagine the art form". But an orchestra that is missing its string section is not reimagined. It is worse.
The moral is simple. Next time you find yourself wanting to reimagine, use your imagination instead. @_alice_elliott
A little more conversation
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, said Wittgenstein. His words echo ancient advice from Epictetus: “Let silence be your general rule; or say only what is necessary and in few words”. From Taoist meditation to Hindu mauna to Christian contemplative prayer, silence is a common fetish among the intellectually and spiritually devout.
A new book by English professor Paula Marantz Cohen offers a rebuttal. Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilising Power of Conversation is a hymn to the hubbub, and a passionate argument for the value of chatter.
Conversation, implores Cohen, is a great pursuit. Unlike persuasion or argument, conversation in its “platonic form” is “non-utilitarian”. There are, however, benefits. At its best it not only brings pleasure, but also expands the mind, sustains the soul and elicits happiness.
“Our society abounds in bad conversation” Cohen laments. Reasons range from uncomfortable restaurants to identity politics to the packaging of bad conversation as entertainment. Bad talk is a spectacle, she observes. Good talk, meanwhile, is rarely portrayed because it is “less fun to watch than engage in”.
Essential to good conversation is a kind of improvised open-endedness. It is not dialectic, whittling toward agreement. Nor is it a method designed to yield a specific outcome such as compromise or consensus. Instead, it is simply process.
This is refreshing. Often we are told the antidote to acrimony lies in the pursuit of common ground, in turning partisanship into productive disagreement. But Cohen doesn’t go that far. She just wants us to talk. Not about anything in particular, or with any goal in mind.
That said, she is enjoyably finicky about the conditions of good conversation. It requires trust, of course. But almost as important as mutual good will is the presence of good food. Her best setting for quality conversation? “I favour a sit down meal.” @AlexDymoke
Dinner party declaration
Bad dinner parties are the enemy of good conversation. It is very frustrating to be trapped in a conversation about property prices while, across the table, someone is discussing who should be the next manager of Chelsea. Fortunately, the third President of the United States is at hand. Thomas Jefferson is well known for his principles of democratic government, for his statute on religious freedom and for his guide to agrarian production. But his finest contribution to the culture is surely his principles that guarantee the best dinner party. Jefferson insisted, when he had people round his table for dinner, that there be just one conversation. He considered it an offence against etiquette for private talking to break out. The whole table must listen and only one person can speak at once. There should be a topic of conversation for the evening and guests should come ready to explore it. Try it next time you have people round for dinner. It can’t go wrong. Either they enjoy it and want to come again, which is good; or they hate it and don’t want ever to return, which is even better. @PhilipJCollins1
Sorry you feel that way
There are four components of a good apology. 1. Explain what happened without defending it. 2. Say what you’re going to do now and in the future. 3. Charge it with emotion so it sounds like you (thereby avoiding the accusation ‘forced to post by their PR’.) 4. Timing: apologise swiftly, but not to the extent that it appears rushed.
Presenters Alison Hammond and Dermot O'Leary got into hot water recently for saying the ‘whole point’ of theatre-going was to sing ‘very very loudly’ over performers. Hammond’s apology was the right length, passionate and authentic. O’Leary’s statement, three hours later, was brusque, reluctant and didn’t contain an apology. It was written off as insincere.
Many harassment apologies are pure damage control, lawyered to within an inch of their life. But Community writer Dan Harmon’s lengthy apology-by-podcast was called ‘a master-class in how to apologise’ by Megan Ganz, the junior staffer he harassed. On hearing Harmon’s monologue, Ganz publicly forgave him. Reporter Nancy Updike said the apology was “startling because it was not curt or vague. It was not a lawyered up mess of non-contrition in the passive voice. It was a true reckoning, publicly and fully accepted by the person who'd been wronged.”
Genuine contrition matters. In 2008, people from indigenous communities sat in Parliament to hear Labor Party Prime Minister Kevin Rudd acknowledge that Australia had systematically dehumanised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The apology was met with applause and tears, and embraced by Australians. Sorry isn’t always enough. But good apologies are powerful things. @james_carroll
Jargon-buster: Laser-like focus
Dominic Raab, elaborating on his resignation letter in The Times, said: "At a time when the government has a laser-like focus on delivering its top priorities for the British people, [the notion I’m a bully] risks allowing a small minority of officials to put the handbrake on important reforms.” One problem with “laser-like focus” is the implication that there are varying degrees of focus. Either the government is focused on something or it is not. A far greater problem, though, is overuse. Repetition has not only sucked the life from the phrase but somehow infected it with the spirit of Alan Partridge. It is such a weary cliche that anyone who refers to their own “laser-like focus” undermines their case — for true focus surely entails an aversion to dead phrases. After all, political effectiveness requires creativity, and a gift for vivid and precise expression. That Raab has neither is a greater clue to his poor ministerial record than a few civil servants asking to be treated with respect. @AlexDymoke
LANGUAGE AND BEYOND
A podcast on Tucker Carlson’s departure from Fox News with an interesting view into how the Murdochs view their top presenters, and why, despite Carlson’s enormous following, no-one, in the end, is bigger than the network.
The 10,000 steps myth. The fascinating story of the default step goal found in most health tracker apps. “It comes to us not from science, but via the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the backlash to McDonald's after Super Size Me came out in 2004, and the human predilection for round numbers.”
How ChatGPT is challenging accepted ideas about the way human beings learn language. From the Economist (£).
Following Emma Watson’s viral Instagram post about her “Saturn Return”, a perceptive piece on the insidious ideology underlying what the author calls “Millennial woo woo jargon”.
A brilliant Ben Lerner short story from a few weeks ago in the New Yorker.
Interesting article on the widespread trend of Russian-speaking Ukrainians rejecting the “language of the oppressor” and learning Ukrainian for the first time.
Great little piece on irksome start-up jargon: Start ups stop ‘democratising access’ to things - “The expression usually has one meaning when used by a company: ‘We’ve made something slightly easier for you to buy.’”
Fascinating FT piece on “place branding” investigates how shiny new urban developments get their bizarre names: “New developments, sometimes entire neighbourhoods, are branded with ever-swankier names as developers, local authorities and the odd business group are forced to compete for attention. Some are disassociated from local history; others stretch credulity. Some are plain illogical, and some just don’t work out. But place-naming has always been a haphazard affair, prone to criticism, changing sensibilities — and sometimes mockery.”
New from us
Labour should scrap the tuition fee pledge and end middle class handouts argues Phil in his Evening Standard column.
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On the subject of laser-like focus. Suggest avoiding the work 'focus' completely. It's too vague. Are you doing something or not. Focusing on something suggests you are just looking. Best demonstration of this idea is that focus was one of Liz Truss's favourite words.
Thanks for your posts, they are very valuable to understand that native speakers sometimes haven’t figured it all out either ;) also both really amusing and eye-opening!