Fungible Convictions

I made my first submission to urbandictionary.com today after I noticed the single definition for “cancer card” was grossly inadequate, as it focused on the whinyness of cancer patients rather than the AWESOMENESS of being able to play the card, despite the circumstances that got you there.

So here’s my definition, which was approved today and should be posted here tomorrow:

Cancer card

The unassailable excuse of cancer patients and their immediate family that gets them out of events and responsibilities as needed.

Example:
John didn’t want to go to his cousin’s wedding. So at the last minute, he played the cancer card and told his aunt he didn’t feel well enough to make it. While his aunt fretted about what his absence meant for John’s health, John watched college football all afternoon in his underwear.

I was looking up a word–”divil”–from the Planxty song “As I Roved Out” (from “devil”, it’s a negation word, so that “divil a one could hear us” means “no one could hear us”), and Wikipedia redirected me to an entry on Hiberno-English with a lovely section on words for drinking too much:

There are many terms for having consumed a drop too much drink, many are used elsewhere, but the Irish tendency is to attempt to find the most descriptive adjective yet on each occasion. Some examples: “loaded”, “blocked”, “twisted”, “full” (common in Ulster), “as full as a Gypsy’s tit”, “spannered”, “Spangled”, “scuttered”, “menashed”, “stocious/stotious”, “bananas”, “baloobas” (common in Cavan), “locked”, “langered”, “mouldy” (pron. mowldy as in “fowl”; used in Galway esp.), “polluted”, “flootered”, “plastered”, “bolloxed”, “banjaxed”, “well out of it”, “wankered”, “fucked”, “fuckered”,”paraplegic” (common in Kilkenny), “ossified”, “binned”, “rat-arsed”, “gee-eyed”, “demented”, “flahed drunk”, “langers altogether”, “in shit drunk” (common in Cork), “buckled”, “steaming” (common in Donegal), “messy”, “rotten”, “out of me tree” (common in Limerick) “off me head altogether”, “off my face”, “sloppy”, “cabbaged”, “wasted”, “paralytic/palatic”, “full as a boot”, “full up”, “full as the bingo bus” (common in Louth), “legless”, “hammered”, “circling over Shannon”, “blootered”, “squooshed”, “banjoed”, “mullered”, “bingoed”, “mangled”, “ruined”, “landed”, “cant even see my hand in front of my face” “half-tore”,”lubed” (Common in Ballincollig), “oiled”, “jarred” (not too drunk, “I’m not drunk, I’m just a bit jarred!”), “scorched”, “in the horrors”, (common in Waterford), “in the rats”, “in the livin’ rats”, “in the livin’ fuckin’ rats” (common in Dungarvan, Co. Waterford), “stoned” (Louth/South Monaghan only), “I’m off my tits”, “binned”, “pissed”, “cut and half cut”, “flamin’” (common in Kerry), “sozzled”, “blottoed”, “trolleyed”, “sloshed”, “wrecked”, “rancid”, “goosed”, “off my game”, “off my trolley”, “gimped”, “destroyed”, “wrote”, “wrote off”, “guitaroed” ‘”I wasn’t banjoed I was guitaroed”‘, “steamed” (common in Mayo), “off my chops” (common in Clonakilty), “sauced” (Fermanagh) “transmoglified”, “I was off me shoe”/ “I fell off my shoe”, “smashed”, “so drunk he couldn’t spell his own face”. (Phrases in italics are more “colourful”)

Just after I wrote a post about imprecision in corporate language, my wife and I went to the grocery store and came upon this packaging:

I guess some companies know how to be as precise as a sledgehammer.

Human resources-ese is a particularly painful dialect of English. A good example (LinkedIn account required) was just posted by human resources at Iron Mountain, a Boston-based records management company that I’m a big fan of.

Their posting for “Director, Marketing Communications & Programs for Iron Mountain North America” shows just how ingrained human resources-ese is: wordy, repetitive, with Dilbertesqe vocab. So for fun I’ve rewritten it in clear English. (Interesting however is how my version sounds less official—that’s how stuck we are with human resources-ese.)

Original Iron Mountatin paragraphs indented:

The Director, Marketing Communications & Programs for Iron Mountain North America is able to translate business goals and market insights into effective, efficient and integrated marketing communications strategy and programs that deliver measurable impact on revenue. This is a new position that will be expected to improve strong demand generation activities through marketing mix, lead management, analytics and resource management.

The Director, Marketing Communications & Programs, a new position, will run Iron Mountain North America’s integrated marketing communications programs.

Directing a team of 5 or more direct reports, you will team with marketing management, product marketing, sales (inside and outside); sales operations, vendors and others to positively change prospect’s perceptions and behaviors. You will create and manage a plan for multiple service lines and two key vertical to positively impact revenue, awareness and sales enablement. This individual will establish and/or incorporate processes that ensure campaigns and deliverables are managed appropriately, with responses and leads processed in accordance with requirements. You will also be accountable for measure and communicate program results and analyses to key constituents.

With a team of five direct reports, he or she will work with marketing management, inside and outside sales representatives, vendors, and others to measurably influence prospective customers to buy Iron Mountain products and services. This includes creating and executing marketing plans and reporting on their success.

This is a pivotal role in the success of Iron Mountain North America and will be fundamental to our success in transforming our company into a value-added information services business. It requires the presentation of value propositions and key messaging/communication points to target constituencies in ways that drive awareness/recognition, enhance quality and brand perception, ensure resonance, and increase conversion rates to action, thus shortening/easing the marketing and sales cycles.

(None of this needs to be included, really. In effect it states: “We are not currently a value-added information services business. We don’t currently communicate well to target constituencies, and our marketing and sales cycles are too long and difficult to manage.”)

Altogether Iron Mountain H.R. says what needs to be said but does so without elegance. Pet peeve or not, all corporate communications should be persuasive and legally sound, and writers of corporate communications do that by making their writing brief, direct, and clear: in short, easily readable.

I’m reading Style: Towards Clarity and Grace, and for anyone who spends a lot of time writing and thinking about writing, it’s one of the best books on the subject—better than some of the standbys and better than newer books like Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.

But the book has some seriously flaws. Author Joseph M. Williams fails, for example, to follow through on a promised topic, as one Amazon reviewer points out:

The author states on page three that “English writers have responded to three influences on our language. Two are historical and one cultural.” The two historical influences are quickly dealt with, but the cultural influence is never clearly presented.

That’s a serious sin. I would have encouraged Williams to cut way back on the etymological discussion altogether so that he wouldn’t forget to mention explicity the cultural influence on the English language.

Nevertheless, the book is stellar. Williams thrives where other writers on writing have failed: in his examples. You read them and you immediately understand the concept. In his section on concision, he offers this:

Even when you arrange all [sentences' and paragraphs'] parts in all the right ways, they can still succumb to acute prolixity:

The point I want to make here is that we can see the American policy in regard to foreign countries as the State Department in Washington and the White House have put it together and made it public to the world has given material and moral support to too many foreign factions in other countries that have controlled power and have then had to give up the power to other factions that have defeated them.

That is,

Our foreign policy has backed too many losers.

Editing for concision is a skill honed over the course of a lifetime. Authors often don’t realize how few of their words are essential until their article or manuscript is in the hands of an editor with a strict wordcount. (Concision is a life-long skill, but authors don’t know that until they have an editor.) (Authors learn concision once they have an editor.) That life-long learning process accelerates with Style: Towards Clarity and Grace. It focuses less on rehashing the rules we learned in middle school English and more on why what works, works.

For anyone who wants to write a follow-up, know that Williams dismisses precision altogether. (In fact, he misuses precision when he writes that it has to do merely with battles over that/which, I/me, etc.) Precision in language means that two or more people understand the same word to mean the same thing. His neglecting precision—his neglecting almost everything to do with thoughtful language, an linguistic order of magnitude less than “sentence” and “paragraph”—holds the entire book back. Addressing precision could greatly improve a future version.