Value-Added, Outside-the-Box Sea Change--in Just Five Short Weeks!

If you've heard them once, you've heard them a thousand times:

"Back to the drawing board."

"Get our ducks in a row."

"Do the heavy lifting."

"Think outside the box."

We're talking clichés, the banal staples of business meetings, conference calls, speeches, and web content. You're tired of them; I'm tired of them. Yet when push comes to shove, when our feet are to the fire, and--especially--at the end of the day, we keep coming back. Like moths to that bright, hot, flickering thing.

It's a losing battle, the fight against clichés. But I'm tanned, rested, and ready; I have my game face on; I came to play; I'm good to go! Clichés, prepare to meet your unmaker.

A few words of clarification before we begin formal banishment procedures. Clichés are different from buzzwords or jargon. Buzzwords are coinages created to impress laypersons or define new phenomena. (One of my new favorites, from Buzzwhack, is landspam, meaning "junk mail.") Jargon is language specific to a group or profession; it's often distinguished by acronyms and initialisms ("EOD" for "end of day") and scientific-sounding, polysyllabic words: deliverable, actionable, metrics, synergy, core competencies.

"Cliché" is itself a bit of old jargon: derived from the verb clicher (to click), it's a French printing term for "stereotype," which in the late 1700s referred to a type of printing from a plate (which evidently made a clicking sound as it hit molten metal). By the early nineteenth century, "stereotype" meant "an image perpetuated without change," and by 1922 we had the modern meaning: "a preconceived and oversimplified notion."

That's what clichés are: trite, overused expressions that have worn deep ruts in our brains. They're what George Orwell, whose essential "Politics and the English Language" (read it here) was published sixty years ago, called "worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves."

Does anyone remember which box "outside the box" refers to? (Here's the most plausible answer I could find.) Are there any "solutions" that don't have "value" "added" to them, and if there are, why would I want them? When you exhort your staff to "work smarter, not harder," are you implying they've been stupid until now or telling them they can come in at 11 and leave at 3? (Sounds smart to me.)

But the Top Ten clichés I want to put to rest belong to a special class: not just overused but misused. Some of them made sense when they were coined and lost meaning when they migrated to a new context. Others were dimwitted from the start. In every case, they've been repeated so often that few of us (except for professional nags and word nerds like me) stop to think about them. That's the purpose of today's exercise: Stop. Think. And then think of something clear and fresh to say.

Top Ten Wrongheaded Clichés

Best of breed. Fine if you've got a collie entered at Westminster. If you're talking about computer parts, this dog won't hunt.

Built from the ground up. I'm trying hard to think of something that's built from the sky down. Nope, can't do it. If you mean "assembled here in our plant" or "built from original parts," why not say it?

N short/long days/weeks/months/years. On my calendar, "three short months" equal three years of Februaries. "Six long days" have 144 hours, just like "six short days." When you're speaking or writing about the perception of time, don't pair a comparative modifier like "short" with an absolute numerical reference. "Only five years" is fine; "the three hours seemed to drag" is OK, too. (I grant an exception to the clever business name Nine Short Months, a doula, or childbirth-assistant, service.)

Drink the Kool-Aid. In 1978 (yes, nearly 30 short years ago), 914 people committed mass suicide at Jonestown when they consumed a fatal concoction made from Kool-Aid (or more likely the cheap imitation Flavor-Aid). It was a horrible tragedy with overtones of The Heart of Darkness. (If you need a reminder, a new documentary about Jonestown opens this week.) Today, "drinking the Kool-Aid" has come to mean "accepting the company's story"--death entirely optional. A repellent and trivializing expression.

Level playing field. Oh, we do love our sports metaphors. "Level playing field" is supposed to conjure up perfect fairness and equity--a concept that makes about as much sense as the Googler-in-Chief's saying, "One has a stronger hand when there's more people playing your same cards." But think about it: there's no more level a playing field than an ice rink, but that doesn't guarantee one hockey team won't outplay another. Besides, as Charles Memminger observed several years ago in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, "Who wants a level playing field? I want the playing field to be set at a 45-degree angle and I want to be running downhill with a wind at my back, by god." Economic libertarians in particular find "level playing field" annoying. In business, writes a correspondent to the New York Sun's blog, "each competitor has distinct advantages and disadvantages. Sam Walton wasn't competing on a level playing field when Wal-Mart first went up against discount king K-Mart. Tiny Microwave Communications, Inc. (MCI) wasn't in a fair fight in 1969 when it began to offer long distance telephone service between Chicago and St. Louis, putting it in competition with mighty AT&T."

Steep learning curve. When it's used to mean "very challenging and arduous," it ignores the statistical concept on which it's based: the steeper the curve, the faster the learning. A long, gradual slope indicates a slow, difficult process.

800-pound gorilla (in the room). Two concepts are mashed up here. In business, an "800-pound gorilla" is the dominant force in an industry--a Microsoft, a Starbucks, a Procter & Gamble. The metaphor comes from the children's joke: "Where does an 800-pound gorilla sleep? Anywhere it wants." (In the days of elephant jokes, a pachyderm played the role of Bossy Sleeper.) But once the big ape moves indoors, it becomes "the problem nobody wants to acknowledge." I'm guessing this usage is related to the famous "Gorillas in Our Midst" inattentional-blindness study performed by two Harvard professors. They asked participants to watch a group of students passing a basketball and count the passes made either by the black-shirted players or the white-shirted players; a surprisingly large number of people were so absorbed in the counting task they never noticed a person in a gorilla suit strolling through the game. The study won a 2004 Ig Nobel award; you can watch the basketball video here. My point? Keep your simians straight or risk making a monkey of yourself.

Lion's share. More animal crackers. Invariably used to signify "the majority" or "the biggest part"-- and invariably wrong. "The lion's share" is the punch line of a joke that goes back to Aesop. The lion, the fox, the wolf, and the jackal agreed to go hunting and share equally in the spoils. The wolf killed a stag and brought it back to his companions to divide it up. Not so fast, said Mr. Lion: "I get the first part because I am king, the second part because I'm the bravest, and the third part because I'm strongest." The lion's share, in other words, is the whole thing. (Read the whole fable here, along with all the others, beautifully illustrated by Milo Winter.)

Low-hanging fruit. When businesspeople speak of "low-hanging fruit," they mean "easy pickings," "the most readily achievable goal." That's because businesspeople spend all their time in cubicles and conference rooms and rarely look at actual fruit trees. I'm looking at my own lemon tree this very minute, and behold: the ripest fruit is at the top of the tree, where it's been exposed to the sun. Yes, it's easier to pick low-hanging fruit, but it's not a very good idea. (Here's where we need an expression like "Work harder and smarter.") Don't take my word for it; Fast Company's Consultant Debunking Unit interviewed farmers and farm advisers to get to the, um, root of the matter; here's what they had to say.

Sea change. This lovely phrase originated in Shakespeare's The Tempest, in which Ariel the sprite sings: Full fathom five thy father lies;/Of his bones are coral made;/Those are pearls that were his eyes:/Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea-change/Into something rich and strange. Shakespeare's "sea-change" was a profound transformation. Today, however, the expression (minus its hyphen) is used to signify any shift at all, even, as Michael Quinlon observes in World Wide Words, by "pundits and commentators who think it has something to do with the ebb and flow of the tide." ("I wish a figurative full fathom five to such people," he adds.) When small and medium-size businesses start outsourcing their information technology departments, it's not a sea change, it's a tactical decision. Now, global warming: that's a sea change.

That's my list. What's yours? Are there any clichés you can't live without? Any I've overlooked that set your teeth on edge? Leave a comment and tell the world.

Comments

[Elizabeth]

One of my favorite examples of a cliche too far removed from its origin: the many sports teams called "Trojans." It was a long and bloody war, and in the end, the Trojans *lost*.

[Sylvia Paull]

Enough said, and well said at that!

[Charles]

I understand and share your objections to cliche's (that's an accent on the "e" masquerading as an apostrophe). But byond the fact that's it's a cliche', I don't think "level playing field" finds usage in a way inconsistent with its meaning. I always thought that "level playing field" meant you and I, as competitors, have no advantage beyond the differences in our abilities. So if I were to say (I wouldn't, so as to avoid a cliche') "I want us to have a level playing field," I'd mean that I don't want you to derive an advantage over me and vice versa from the phyiscal attributes of the competition venue.
P.S. Nice piece.

[Sim]

How about "----- is the new black"? Or "paradigm shift"

[Stephanie Beack]

Ah, lovely post. Thank you! There are many that I really cannot tolerate but one that particularly annoys me is "Skin in the Game". When I'm doing a business deal, I don't want to see any more skin than necessary. And, business transactions are only "games" when they are done without integrity or authenticity.

[Bryan]

Love your blog. You write, I read and link. Looks like a "win-win situation."

[Nancy]

Sim--Yes, what about "X is the new Y"? Over at Language Log (one of my daily reads), they've coined a term for this construction: "snowclone." The term covers several "cliché frames," including "If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z." Read the original post, and link to a long chain of follow-ups, here: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000350.html

Stephanie--I wonder whether "skin in the game" would have caught on if it hadn't been coined by none other than Warren Buffet. I agree, it's an unpleasant image--right up there with "eat your own dog food" (which I think has a very similar meaning).

[Becca]

"Pushing the envelope" bothers me, not so much because it's a cliché, but because I don't understand the metaphor. Do you know where that one came from?

[Nancy]

Becca--If you've ever read Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" or seen the movie based on it, you'll understand the context for "pushing the envelope." It's an aviation term that means "pushing the aircraft to its limits." (In "The Right Stuff," the limit was the sound barrier.) According to www.wordorigins.org, "in the world of aeronautical engineering the envelope is the collection of curves that describe the maximum performance of an aircraft." Of course, every middle manager wants to sound like a top gun, so the metaphor found a new home on terra firma.

[mike]

"Built from the ground up" suggests that it's not a cosmetic change, it's a tear-down and rebuild. Makes sense to me. The likelihood of this actually being _true_ for a product thus described is, of course, a separate matter.

I'm with Charles on "level playing field." Which however ignores that in many games, teams change sides at halftime. :-)

"Drink the Kool-Aid": As someone noted recently, many people who use this phrase weren't even born when the tragedy in question occurred, and have no idea what it actually refers to.

BTW, some people I'm affiliated with recently released some software that comes in several flavors, including "core," "toolkit," and -- I kid you not -- a "Value-add release." Obviously they didn't consult with me before that name was -- heh -- cast in concrete.

[John]

Another vote here for "paradigm shift". It's used almost exclusively to mean simply "change", rather than the original and intended meaning of "total change of worldview".

pax et bonum

[Nancy]

John: Re "paradigm shift" -- hear, hear! As R.L. Trask put it in "Say What You Mean!" (a learned and readable guide to style and usage), "This term was introduced by Thomas Kuhn into the philosophy of science, but it has been picked up and applied with wearisome frequency to almost any change in policy or fashion. Avoid it in favor of something more explicit."

And as long as we're in the "P's," let's also place a moratorium on "parameter" to mean "limit," or, worse, "characteristic." Here's what John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun has to say about this frequently used mathematical term: http://blogs.baltimoresun.com/about_language/2007/03/if_beggars_coul.html

[dave paisley]

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Clear? No? But I was being original and using my own words to express myself.

While I agree with the premise of the article and that a lot of expressions are lame and overused, there's a balance to be struck between originality and economy.

The economy of understanding is lost, of course, when people misunderstand and misapply the metaphor. Even you misunderstand "level playing field". It was never intended (as noted in a prior comment) to eliminate competitive advantage, merely that there should be no inherent unfairness in the way the business is conducted.

A perfect example is the inherent unfairness of agricultural subsidies in the west (particularly the EU and US) that make it difficult or even impossible for developing countries to compete.

And while "drinking the kool-aid" has some macabre overtones, used well by people who know and understand the origins, it is a powerful metaphor for brainwashing.

Good article :)

[Peter Schweitzer]

My current pet peeve: "out of pocket", which should mean you had to pay for something, and is now often misused to mean a person was away or unavailable.

[Erika]

Corporate cliches drive me bananas. In protest, I've started using my own. They're not catching on, (I can't imagine why!) ha!

Low hanging bee hive
Throw the monkey out with the tricycle
Think outside the equilateral triangle
Get our pigeons in a row
Drink the company capri-sun
Lion’s share of the animal crackers