Friday, May 30, 1997

Let's shift paradigms to downsize weasel words

By JON TALTON / Knight-Ridder Newspapers

Let me share a story, while I'm sitting here multitasking, of just how far the paradigm has shifted. To do otherwise on deadline might result in a career redirection.

Back when "1984" meant more than just a year, the greatest risk to the language came from the utopian totalitarian impulse that has so bloodied this century. About the only plain-speaking commie was the endearing Nikita Khrushchev ("We will bury you!") - and the Politburo sacked him.

As it turns out, the free world won the Cold War. We made the planet safe for business consultants. We just may never be able to understand each other again.

Once upon a time, when a company didn't want to spring for office space for all its employees, it might be called "cheap," "a tough place to work" or a Marine Corps infantry platoon. Now we know it's really "alternative officing."

Doesn't that make you feel better?

Once upon a time, we talked around the water cooler or in a coffee room. Now we share things in activity zones, lest we become bored in our activity settings.

Doesn't that make you feel more productive?

And of course if things don't work out, the company may decide it's time for downsizing, rightsizing or a people action - resulting in some redirected careers.

Now, doesn't that ease the pain?

We are drowning in this insipid soup, and short of a putsch by George Carlin, I see no relief.

Human beings are impelled to make tools and languages. But we're also euphemists, and history is rich with whole cultures built around avoiding directness. And, as Churchill remarked, if we all spoke the whole truth to each other all the time, we wouldn't be able to bear it.

With business going through a shift as momentous as the Industrial Revolution, it's no surprise that it has built its own language and euphemisms.

Too bad for us that late 20th-century America gets its voice not from Shakespeare or Byron, but from Marx, technical manuals, Barry Manilow, political correctors, 12-steppers and social scientists. (In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that in graduate school a professor warned me that I wrote too "clearly" to be a professional historian.)

Much of this drivel is harmless, the cultural equivalent of Spam. But language matters. As it becomes imprecise, arid and inane, we become more vulnerable to the intellectual con artists who populate our age.

The totalitarians used language to lie. The Soviet constitution guaranteed liberties - but what were those words against the actions of a gangster regime? The Nazis talked of home, children, hearth and cultural struggles. Beneath the words lay genocide.

George Orwell understood this when most Western intellectuals were in the thrall of Stalin's mendacity. In "1984," the dictator called himself Big Brother, the military was the Ministry of Love and for a brief moment, transformed by real love, the protagonist realized his entire world was a lie, a universal gulag dressed up in pleasant words.

This is the extreme peril of weasel words. But at stations less extreme, they can be a burden to business. Executives who forget how to speak clearly may soon forget how to think clearly. And that could challenge the profitability model.