Does “Reach Out” Make You Retch?

In my new column for the Visual Thesaurus, I take a long look at the reach out idiom, as in “We’ve reached out to the WHO to see what they know” (a line of dialogue from the new Steven Soderbergh movie Contagion). I wondered why reach out was both so widespread and so derided as “euphemism,” “jargon,” “useless verbiage,” or “a dramatic way of saying a very mundane thing.”

 

Ngram for reach out, showing a steady increase in usage since about 1970, when Diana Ross released her single “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand).” Ngrams draw on a corpus of published books.

 

 

When I searched for reach out, reached out, and reaching out in the last 30 days of the New York Times, I got a total of 117 results, almost all of them metaphorical rather than literal. They include “In Egypt, Islamists Reach Out to Wary Secularists,” “Reaching Out to the Tea Party in S.C.,” and “Then last summer, something surprising happened—the Pentagon reached out to him.”

I found exactly one use of reach(ed)(ing) out in the literal “touching with fingers” sense, in a Sunday Magazine article about a young man with autism:

“Oh,” Justin said reverently, reaching out his hand to touch it. “That’s beautiful.”

You’ll need to subscribe to read the entire Visual Thesaurus column, which includes references to Ambrose Bierce, Marshall McLuhan, and the Four Tops. Here’s an excerpt:

 

Reach out doesn’t fit the pattern of other widely loathed business words. It isn’t one of the -izes (e.g., incentivize, monetize, productionalize). It isn’t borrowed from a specialized vocabulary (bandwidth, Six Sigma, synergy). It isn’t misleading (actionable, conquesting, agile, and other words I discussed in a 2010 Candlepower column, “Weird Words from the Corporatese Lexicon”). It isn’t a neologism (user-centric, near-shoring, proactive).

On the contrary: reach and out are two of the oldest, commonest words in the language. Both have Old English roots, and reach has had figurative meanings—“to understand,” “to arrive at a destination or goal”—for centuries. Far-reaching, to mean “extensive,” was first recorded in 1824 (“the dusky heath far-reaching”); overreaching speech appeared in print in 1579. And reach out in the sense of “communicate with” is at least a century old; the OED gives this 1912 example: “Groups and agencies which are planning to reach out to low-income families with educational efforts in the area of sound family life.” Note, too, that we use many other tactile words in figurative senses: Our feelings can be hurt, we’re seized by terror, a story touches us.

But apparently it’s one thing to hear Robert Browning’s “Ah, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp/Or what’s a heaven for?” and quite another to open an email from a colleague and read, “Let’s reach out to Sales for feedback.” It’s not the message; it’s the corporate medium that contaminates reach out.

Read the full article, “Does ‘Reach Out’ Overreach?” Do you agree with the commenter who wrote, “The only time I ‘reach out’ is to strangle the person who said it?” 

UPDATE: Language columnist Jan Freeman, who blogs at Throw Grammar from the Train, offers another angle on reach out: the “NYPD Blue” connection.

Bonus for my blog readers: sing along to one of the original (1979) “Reach Out and Touch Someone” commercials for the Bell System. 

 

Comments

[rootlesscosmo]

I think the Supremes' "Reach out and Touch" was 1969.
The use of "reach out" that I found novel was on "NYPD Blue" some years ago, where it seemed to be used not as a metaphor but as a literal synonym for "telephone." Whether this was an echo of the 1979 Bell slogan I can't say.

[Nancy Friedman]

Rootlesscosmo: "Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)" was the first single recorded by Diana Ross *after* she left the Supremes; it was released in April 1970: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reach_Out_and_Touch_(Somebody's_Hand)

"Reach out" (defined as "contact") is included in the "NYPD Blue" lexicon: http://website.lineone.net/~rmeeks/ I don't remember watching more than a couple episodes of the show, so I can't vouch for any nuances in its meaning.

[Jessica]

I agree with you that there's something about the corporate medium that turns the physical term of connection to one of jargon-esque insincerity.

[CGHill]

Next question: does the noun "outreach," seemingly a function of every nonprofit from Bangor to Bakersfield, have a similar emetic effect?

[Nancy Davis Kho]

oh but i HATE this term. I always have to suppress the urge to scream, "JUST SAY CALL! JUST SAY CALL!" because that's what they mean. Boring as it is.

[Nancy Friedman]

Nancy: The point I make in the VT article is that "reach out" does *not* always mean "call." For example, I don't think the Islamists in the headline were speed-dialing "wary secularists."

[Linda Lowenthal]

But I think what Other Nancy is saying is, it's one thing to use "reach out/outreach" to mean making overtures to someone actoss a gulf of understanding in an even loosely political or diplomatic sense, or putting the word out in a completely different community, or something like that. But it's extremely annoying to use it in reference to simply calling, e-mailing, or texting some guy to ask what's up with the thingamajig. Or the in-between use I hear in meetings all the time--Let's reach out to so-and-so and ask if he has any brilliant ideas about such-and-such. It manages to sound simultaneously pompous and forlorn.