When ideas fail, words come in very handy
— Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe
We live in an age where noisy posturing often substitutes reasoned debates and brash opinion trumps hard facts. The thread of the argument often disappears in a blizzard of gee-whiz statistics, acronyms and catchphrases in intellectual discourses and addresses. It is virtually impossible nowadays to avoid the torrent of clichés and buzzwords, which time and time again keep assailing our ears in professional as well as personal interactions. They are as common today as young student’s earphones. The provenance of both can usually be identified. For example, in science: “A window of opportunity” (from Nasa’s reference to a launch window). Or, in sports: “Step up to the plate” (to move near the plate for striking the ball which is pitched in baseball).
The starry-eyed academics create perceived happiness, empowerment and glory by donning powerful words. Some of these words are so strong and serious that they appear to cloak the whole issue in an aura of “it needs no further questioning”. All the appealing metaphors on websites and academe-best-sellers — “the poverty trap”, “the ladder of development” — go limp under the magnifying glass.
Buzzwords are normally a refuge of Western educated elite. Buzzwords have limited vocabulary life and can be rendered meaningless by overuse. Capacity-building, inclusive growth, environmental sustainability, poverty eradication, community-driven action, collaboration, participatory action, anti-oppression are just some examples of a multitude of terms regularly thrown around by professionals. Like the tribe obsessed with buzzwords, elitists beguile themselves and their audience with clichés like neo-colonialism, academic-imperialism and such other resonant phrases.
Buzzwords are a byproduct of a new intellectual culture where paper is substituted for action, conferences are substituted for work and perquisites are substituted for truly earned rewards. Adept at diplomacy and wordplay, experts obscure the real concerns behind a fog of jargon and euphemism. As legendary philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche puts it: “All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”
Experts live on a planet of their own — in total disconnect with the average citizen and their common issues — dominated by summits, conclaves and conferences. Each one is considered as an important saloon for designing some unique and path-breaking solutions. They strut on the conference stage releasing epigrams like white doves. If we want to move the needle on tough problems, recycling jargon and reusing the same old frameworks is not good enough. It is easy to dish out lectures, but it is an arduous experience to practice it. Any debate about the economic policy for the poor is usually tortuous, long-winded and insular. There is a tendency to stay away from the common ground for common goals, for the development of a desperately poor people. More than anything, it obscures issues. Most of the speech to be littered with the same old boring lines: “long-term economic plan”, and the groans that accompany it. A strong economy isn’t enough, so the new marker for economic success is “inclusive” growth. Try to work inclusive, inclusion, and other variations into conversation to show that you’re in tune with the zeitgeist.
The word development itself, Gilbert Rist observes, has become a “modern shibboleth, an unavoidable password”, which comes to be used “to convey the idea that tomorrow things will be better, or that more is necessarily better”. However, as he goes on to note, the very taken-for-granted quality of “development” and many of the words used in development discourse leaves much of what is actually done in its name unquestioned.
Many of the words that have gained the status of buzzwords are what the philosopher W.B. Gallie termed “essentially contested concepts”. These are terms that combine general agreement on the abstract notion that they represent with endless disagreement about what they might mean in practice. Buzzwords normally gain their purchase and power through their vague and euphemistic qualities, their capacity to embrace a multitude of possible meanings and their normative resonance. The work that these words do is to place the sanctity of a discussion beyond reproach.
In a recent review of CVs of prospective employees in the UK “specialised” took the top spot in the list, making an appearance in nearly half a million CV profiles. Closely followed by “leadership” and “experienced”. It seems we’re also keen to show our zest for our jobs, with words like “successful”, “passionate”, and “enthusiastic” all making the top 10.
Corporate jargon is often used to make something seem more impressive than it actually is. We hide behind corporate “jibber-jabber” to make something obvious sound more complicated and smarter than it really is. Worst of all, many use pretentious jargon — such as attitudinal judgmentality, paradigms, degasification, reconceptualise, sub-optimal, symbiotic linkage and splinterisation. We use them to make the obvious and straightforward sound cerebral and exciting. Meetings have now degenerated in to a quagmire of nonsensical verbal piffle. Popular phrases such as “think outside the box”, which dates back to the early Seventies or “I may have a window for you”, used by busy, arrogant managers, are the most worn-out and fatigued phrases.
The buzzword lexicon contains a number of code words that are barely intelligible to those beyond the borders of subject specialists. They are part of an exclusive and fast-changing vocabulary. They capture one of the qualities of buzzwords: To sound “intellectual and scientific”, beyond the understanding of the layperson, best left to “experts”. Some have their meanings transformed, as they are put to the service of dialogue and debate. Among them, social capital and gender are examples, with applications far distant from the theoretical debates with which they were originally associated. Similarly, empowerment is a term that has perhaps the most expansive semantic bandwidth.
Very often, seminars on development resonate with buzzwords like participation, sustainability and marginalisation and end in copious policy statements. As the popularity of some of them has grown, so has the criticism of the use of ill-defined terminology in a sector that makes tall claims of transparency and accountability. Development communications must purge the meaningless jargon used to gloss over, qualify or even glorify outcomes.
Discussions and seminars on poverty, hunger and starvation are organised at glitzy parties at swanky hotels. Much disservice has been done to the cause of rural development on account of this schizoid approach — alternating engagement and withdrawal. In order to cut through the fog, we have to lend our ear to the voice of the people who are stakeholders. We work to bring out a new earth. This new earth will arrive when our works promote a better order in human society, uphold human dignity and promote love, equality, freedom, beauty and creativity and so on. In the process, we also perfect ourselves and thus our work becomes a means for our self-actualisation.
The least we can do is examine the vocabulary we use and seek to speak plainly and honestly. As Primo Levi reckons in The Drowned and the Saved: “Without a profound simplification, the world around us would be an infinite, undefined tangle that would defy our ability to orient ourselves and decide upon our actions… We are compelled to reduce the knowable to a schema.”
The writer is a well-known banker, author and Islamic researcher. He can be reached at moinqazi123@gmail.com
