Where do buzzwords get started?

How do buzzwords get started in the first place? The one I've been noticing lately is the word "engaged" being thrown around like "moving forward" was a year ago and like "value added" seems to be ingrained deep into people's business-speak right now. I am genuinely curious where this shit gets started. Moreover, I am curious why people can't just talk normally or use regular words. I have wondered if some of it has to do with a type of built in magical thinking about words and how they can effect the world around us. Buzzwords seem almost like a chant in some ways, that if you keep repeating one it will somehow make the idea of that word turn into whatever action you think the word has. Of course, the problem with that is that usually the words have radically different meanings to every person. The person using "engaged' probably picked that up in some management book or journal or blog, which is fine (I guess). It's good that people read. They definitely will have an idea about what they think that word means. If they walk out the door in the morning and just start using that word with other people without context or meaning then the other people probably will recognize that there is this new word in the day-to-day conversation. More than likely the listeners will try to quickly determine what the person is trying to mean by the word, but they will only have their own backgrounds to go with for drumming up some meaning. For example, when I see the word "engaged" I don't think "Ah, they want me to be mentally and emotionally involved in my word and give a damn about it." No, I think Patrick Stewart saying "Engage!". Every time. That isn't going away. When I DO try to separate it, instead of this idea of employee enthusiasm I instead think of mechanical engagement, such as one sprocket wheel in a great big machine being dropped down into a larger cog. I end up with this weird Patrick Stewart voice gigantic steam punk machine in my head, not "I am a fulfilled, satisfied employee that loves his work." If anything, I start to get the idea of being trapped in a meaningless clockwork that I can escape and soon I will be a ground down gear that has to be replaced. "Engaged" probably seemed like a good idea at the time that the person wrote it. They may have had some similar idea about "Engaged like a spring in the clockwork! The clock doesn't work if one spring isn't engaged! Our company is like a fine tuned clock that needs for all the springs to be engaged for it to server its purpose of telling time!" Not that you couldn't take Patrick Stewart's TNG "Engage!" and go places with that too. Still, buzzwords are really more like a type of magical thinking from my perspective. I know that many common phrases we use now we once themselves buzzwords, but because of their overuse over time they have lost their magic and now they have no impact. They are no longer sparkling magic words that no one was using yesterday and now mysteriously is being used today and that I need to sit down and determine "What the fuck does he mean 'engaged'? What is that? What the hell is 'added value'? Are we the 99 cent service desk now? I don't get it."

In many ways, that is the challenge of managing people I suppose. To get them to do something FOR you that you might explain and that they might not care about except insofar as it means they get paid, get to keep their job, get their work done. While some folks believe magic exist (I don't, btw, it goes with my not believing in things) and that it might work exactly the way I describe, the fact that new buzzwords have to come up and people are constantly searching for new ways to "motivate" people, I suspect there is nothing magical about buzzwords. It really is just the fact that the word is novel more than anything else, and after a while the magic of newness goes away. Getting people to care as much as you do about something, though, absolutely that would be magic if it were as easy as simply using a few new words. People keep trying too. Otherwise the magic words wouldn't keep popping up.

The funny thing is, sometimes words can do exactly this, but most often it isn't the words, but how they are said. It isn't the incantation, it's the recitation of the incantation that makes the magic happen. I am reminded of one of my old favorite 80s movies, Fright Night (emphasis is mine):

Peter Vincent: [brandishing a crucifix] Back, spawn of Satan!
Jerry Dandrige: [chuckles] Oh, really?
[Dandridge grabs the cross, crushes it, and throws it aside]
Jerry Dandrige: You have to have faith for this to work on me!

i.e. the "powers" that people want from spells and incantations won't work if you don't believe them. Or, in the case of a manager, if you aren't sincere. Most people can smell insincerity a mile away. Worse than insincerity is the glass eyed stare of not just sincerity but obsession. The idea that someone's entire life is all about some shitty job where you are basically shifting bits of paper around, that doesn't produce the disgust that insincerity generates, that produces the raised eyebrow of skeptical fear.

Once again, this goes back to what so much of everything in the world seems to go back to: balance. If you find the special balance between words, speech, action, feeling, etc. then you probably end up being more charismatic along with being seen as sincere but not crazy. But just throwing the words you read or heard around like THAT is the idea itself and that saying it will spread the idea like a virus, well... good luck kid. The words aren't magic.

You've Angered It

Another great comic.

You've Angered It! (JPEG Image, 943x1218 pixels)

This comic sums up the types of management I see. The glassy eyed look of optimism. The triple-speak of English words put together into a type of gobbledygook that says in 50 words what someone can say in 10 words. The sign in the back that says "I AM A MANAGER. I AM IN CONTROL." The motivational poster of Satan punishing people by simply beating them. The getting happier, shinier, wordier as the manager dances around the real thing she wants to say. The final panel that reveals what happens when normal language is use because using normal language reveals the true self. Language is the magic that keeps the manager's true self hidden beneath a non-offensive veneer of starry eyed optimism and glassy eyed cult of false positivism, but the real creature can only be held at bay by the magical words for so long.

More important is the weight given to busing tables by the manager. That the sanctity of busing tables is unquestionable. Nature has a way for a table busser to look, and pink is not that way. The importance given to the job exist not to convey any true importance to the interviewee about the job (she knows she's going to bus tables and maybe wait on tables later). The importance given to the job only exist to hold up the manager's image of herself as a human being, held together, again, by the magic of language and attitude and unquestionable optimism. All of which fail in the end.

Aphorism AM

Always trying to be a better person is more important than actually being a better person.
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What you own does not reflect who you are.  The condition of what you own, however, does.
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Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Austin: Open Captioned Screenings at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Austin: Open Captioned Screenings at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar

As if the Alamo Drafhouse Cinemas didn't already rock enough.  Open Captioned screenings of WALL-E and HANCOCK.

If you've never been to Austin you're missing a great city to visit, and from everyone I know that lives there it's a great place to live as well.  Austin is on the short list with Chicago of my next place to live.

If you have been to Austin you might have noticed a city with a downtown the size of, say, Birmingham, Alabama, but a community more like San Francisco in attitudes and appreciations for the fact that the world is a big place with a lot of different kind of people that can all work together to make life a little better as opposed to a constant battle to keep things traditional and the same.  I kind of like that about Austin.

One of the other things I noticed for a city of its size was the great attention given to handicapped access to nearly every place in the city, including crosswalks and sidewalks.  That kind of attention isn't always given to a city the size of Austin, but Austin is the home of The Texas School For The Deaf which is located nearby the Austin Motel, a place we have stayed more than a few times for our pilgrimage to various movie related wonders that Austin offers. Re the TSD: "Texas School for the Deaf, located in Austin, is the oldest continuously operating publicly funded school in Texas. Since 1857, over 10,000 students have graced the halls of TSD."

That the Drafthouse embraces all members of their community like this is one of the things that I really do love about the Drafthouse but also about what is says about the attitude of Austin. I can't even tell you if anyone in San Francisco does this, but I don't think so. At best, there are the LED back-caption devices that where being tested in a few places like the Metreon a while back, and I can't say I've seen them in use anywhere else.

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Imaginary Threads Are Still Useful Threads

Believing things does not make them real. I throw that out first thing because what I am going to describe is often believed to be a real thing to those that believe in supernatural or spiritual things.

I recently, in the last few months, started running. My running began entirely as an outlet to anger. I have a job that I do not care for but which I am quite good at (mainly because it requires more organization than it does skill or talent and I can be quite good at being organized when I want to avoid busywork). The people I work for, my managers, though, are often caught up in the buzzword world that managers are caught up in. They see their employees caught up in different buzzword worlds. Managers have a choice, though, to exercise their position to force their buzzword worlds on others and to ignore the buzzword worlds of others. As an employee I have a particular buzzword world I am interested in because the research I have done shows that it leads to things being better for everyone, both manages and employees. However, the choices being made by my managers is to exercise their authority to push their buzzword worlds and ignore ours, no matter how much better ours would make things. This is the kind of thing that leads to a lot of frustration, and a lot of frustration can make you tired and angry and despondent. One day I came home so full of anger about all of this that I just immediately changed clothes into my old tae kwon do pants and a t-shirt and I ran. And ran. Not incredibly far, mind you, since I was not in great shape. Nevertheless, I ran.

The run succeeded in achieving the goal. I was exhausted, sweaty, breathing hard and felt great. I was still angry, mind you, but not full of that tight, shoulder bunching anger that creeps up on you when you sit in the cubicle or at a shitty desk in a windowless wonderland of work all day long. The anger get re-routed inside your mind into a different kind of push. Part of that push is to be able to see yourself as a part of the universe at large and the be able to minimize the importance of the stupidity that permeates your daily life. Certainly the run is not a solution to the problem, but it is an excellent coping method to pull you out of one particular thread of life, and in my case that thread is work.

The work "thread" is not the thread I am actually posting about, however. When I run I sometimes imagine a thread I follow around in a circle. A moving thread that circles the route I run. A thread that undulates with movement and pulsates with changes. I imagine that I am part of that thread when I am running. You do not need to maintain a particular pace or speed or have a goal in mind to drop into the thread and join it and become part of it. My thread serves as nothing more than an imaginary visual device to push and pull me along the run. It help me push a little harder when I can and to know when something I feel might lead to injury when I can't push hard. It's a great imaginary device that I love, and it changes all the time about what it is. Sometimes it is a thread. Other times it is a wave. Still other times it might be a series of sequential explosions below my feet that is timed with the music I listen to while I run.

There is one thing I know about the thread, the wave, the explosion: it isn't real and it doesn't represent something special in the universe. It is just my imagination. It is me. I don't "believe" in the thread. I simply use my imagination to make it exist in my mind to use it to serve my purpose. There are many folks that believe these kind of imaginings are somehow tapping into real things or "energies" or other kinds of non-distinct entities of the universe that we can't see or feel but intuit and are somehow are revealed to our imaginations. To that end, though, I must say "So what?" If that is true would it matter to me? What if it were true and I was the only one that could intuit it or experience it or know about it, what difference would it then have from existing only in my imagination anyway? None. My life is not bereft or sad from seeing my running threads as my imagination providing me with a device for self-motivation. I do not "believe" in these threads as physical or spiritual real things. The threads are just self imagined fantasies that provide me with something intangible but useful: motivation to push through the run.

Ten Movies

The Ten Movie Meme

(From an old LiveJournal post, but I thought it was nicely relevant here.)

boson pointed me over to Kung Fu Monkey (a.k.a. John Rogers) blog for the ten movie meme. The meme is essentially this:

"Explain America to someone from somewhere else by giving them 10 movies to watch.
The idea is not to give them a history lesson, so you don't have to start with The New World and end with Jarhead.
What you're trying to do is give them a sense of who we are -- your take on our dreams, our attitudes, our idioms, what we think we are, what we are afraid we are, what we really might be."


Honestly, it's a tough meme. Not one that I frankly feel necessarily prepared to put forth a definitive list on. I can, however, give a few suggestions as to what I have seen in my own life that I feel are quintessentially American films that explain us in some very odd ways. But we are an odd, odd people. We're often like that guy you like a lot, that can be brilliant and funny and creative, and he's kind of big, and sometimes, though, when he's had too much to drink, he's scary and funny at the same time.

The "American dream" idea is thoroughly entrenched in so many American films that have made it to other countries that I do not believe it's necessary to include any sort of Horatio Alger stories here.

I'm not sure how to... defend some of my choices. See, America is a strange, strange place. We all have some strange ideas about it both good and bad. I mean, look, it's a country of every weakness and strength exhibited in humanity. Great struggles, great treachery, great heroics, great despicableness, etc. Innocence at one turn and downright evil at the next.

These are in no particular order.

1. His Girl Friday (1940) - this is the bar for which all verbal American screwball comedies that follow must meet. However, it is also quite a sneaky riff on politics on all levels.
Short to preface the movie: The Three Stooges Hoi Polloi - (1935) - While the Three Stooges are mostly thought of as slapstick, I urge you to read the description of this short. They were, overall, great social critics. The wealthy people are the both the object of derision and the perpetrators of evil schemes. The intellectuals are aloof and consider the working man as nothing more than slightly above an animal. I've always considered the Three Stooges a quite sophisticated social satire, but I know most folks don't really agree with this.

2. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (1997) - When I first saw this movie I was moved by the fact that a movie so succinctly and perfectly captured what my own personal idea of what I thought America was like when I was a child. Terry Gilliam knows, and Hunter S. Thompson knew, a lot more about America than most of us know about ourselves. I will admit to having read the book after seeing the movie, but I will say that it is without question my favorite piece of American writing. Although the movie is often very different than the book, it captures the desperate melancholy of lost hope that once you thought you could change the world simply by feeling something with everyone else. And it captures the 70s too, too well. The decadent self-indulgence of the individual. The loss of sanity. The complete breakdown from the outside looking in and the inside looking out and being both unable to see anything but seeing everything with complete clarity.

3. DOUBLE FEATURE TIME! Yes, it's a cheat. Tough. The double feature is a bygone thing, I know, but see...
Superman (1978) and the more current Batman Begins (2005). Look, you can try to understand America all you want by studying war films, union films, true life gritty films that hurt you to watch. And that's fine. But those films are quite often so intensely involved with our real history that the entertaining part of a movie is lost. I'm not saying they shouldn't be entertaining. One of my favorite films about post-WWII germany is one of those films, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. But to understand what Americans think about heroes, you have to see what in their heart of hearts they desire a hero to be in both the light of the good man and the shadows of the bad man. The great heart and the great avenger. The optimism that justice will prevail and the pessimism that if justice doesn't work then something will. These two films explain more about us than we know.

4. Sergeant York (1941) - Of all the movies about American heroes this is probably my favorite. This is a movie that I believe portrays Christianity at its very best. That it is exactly about saving the soul from the temptations to right those wrongs that we believe have been done to us. It also accurately portrays the anguish and soul searching that even a simple man must go through to reach the conclusions about what he truly believes when it comes to God and country. I can't really think of a movie that so beautifully explains this idealistic notion of God and country, but what an often terrible price we must pay as individuals to have the freedom of God and country.

5. They Live (1988) - John Carpenter captures that niggling feeling that something is really, really, really wrong. Working men and women decimated to living in slums. The police force a protector of the government and not the people. No explanations. This movie all too well captures the opposite of 80s optimism portrayed by the leaders in the face of nuclear confrontation. That there's some sort of price we pay for our blindness to the obvious. In this case, that we are betraying humanity and becoming not a third world nation, but leading the path to a third world world all for the price of fancy parties., trips to exotic places and short term comfort. Not to mention the best fucking fight scene in any American movie ever.

6. Ok... let the controversy begin! Toys Are Not For Children (1972) - I first saw this at Butt-Numb-A-Thon 6 and was nothing short of mortified and disturbed and shaken not stirred. Yet... yet... I bought it on DVD. And I have watched it many times, and I have passed it along to friends. And it never stops hurting me. Disturbing me. Disgusting me. Yet this movie is something that I feel is a must see if you want to understand the real depths of how completely and utterly America can be culturally and sexually fucked up. At its most basic, it's and Electra complex story. Screaming all over the place is the psychosis of our country during the late 60s and early 70s. There's just something so incredibly wrong about this movie that it is an example of exactly how screwed up and slimy and creepy we can be in light of all the dreams, desires, heroism and creativity of all of our great individuals. This is the movie that shows you exactly what are not Great Everyday Americans. But they are still Americans. Some people might suggest the better acting of Blue Velvet or perhaps the more complex story of Happiness, to those people I say "Pft!". Those movies are about slimy people. Toys Are Not For Children is both about, by and for slimy people.

7. Now, this is a stretch, and some people are gonna hate me for such a weird suggestion, but here is it. Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode 602, Invasion USA (also explained nicely at Wikipedia) (1994 / 1952) - Yeah, yeah, it's a stretch. But, this episode contains a masterful amount of stuff in two hours. First, the 1950 short A Date With Your Family in which the American family is prescribed, directed, and in some ways practically threatened to turn dinnertime into something that father not only will enjoy but should never, ever, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES be disturbed by. Hard to explain the social hygiene movement, but I think having this single short with Mike and the Bots riffing is the best introduction to this weird part of American history. Now, the movie itself is nothing but a straight up red scare propaganda piece. You lazy Americans, sitting around, making yourselves fat, boozing it up, working for only yourselves. And for what? For the SLAUGHTER! That's right, the commies aren't boozing it up (ok, well, maybe they were) making themselves fat (ok, I'll conceded that their poor diet probably DID make them fat) and living for only themselves (HA! THAT I have it on good authority was accurate during this period), they're preparing for WAR! The WAR AGAINST GOD AND THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE! And what are YOU doing? NOTHING! You make me SICK! Every last one of you. Is there nothing that will make you change your ways? If only I were, perhaps, a hypnotizing svengali that could make you SEE the errors of your ways! This movie and the accompanying MST3K action are such a great explanation of the American Red Scare movement and ourselves being able to look back at it with head shaking wonder. So, sue me you haters.

8. It's pretty dumb to make such a list without including Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing. This movie goes further in explaining the weird, strange, angry, dangerous, hopeful and sad feelings brewing underneath our veneers about race. It clearly shows that 20 years "after" the struggle for civil rights that blacks, whites, and everyone in between don't understand shit each other most of the time. But there's that one fleeting moment between Sal and Mookie where even when it goes against our own interests, we sometimes have to let the other person do the right thing.

9. It would be a shame to not include a western in such a list. It is practically what many people in many countries basically thought of Americans for so many years. The Western was the genre that we exported time and again in the 50s, and what so many people all around the world were given as the idea of America and Americans. Because of that, it's incredibly difficult to pick one. In particular it is difficult to pick one made by an American. Moreover, you basically have to pick between a set of only a few actors. It's either Wayne, Eastwood, Fonda or Stewart. In the end, I can't even really pick anything. I'd say, pick between The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, or My Darling Clementine. You won't go wrong with any of those films.

10. Jenn and I had a long discussion about this, but ultimately, it's the best of them. Apocolypse Now (1979) - Jenn is just flat out right about this movie representing all levels of stories and our relationship to Vietnam. Politics, the individual, the ideas of morality and when to abandon them. The movie is so rich and so accurate in how screwed up things were for everyone involved in Vietnam that it ultimately has to be viewed as the American "vietnam movie".


Honorable Mention: It's hard to make this kind of list without pulling in at least one American adolescent film. One teenage movie that explains with certainty the various flavors of utter and total desperation that we as Americans in the 20th century dealt with during the short part of lives that ends up shaping the rest of it. There's really only one flavor that describes it. And that, my friends, is the drain cleaner tainted flavor of corn nuts. 1989's Heathers explains exactly what weird lengths we go to in high school to both be popular and to rage against all of that which "popularity" represents. It also makes clear delineations of what exactly it is that's acceptable in all directions of these extremes. More importantly it touches on some of the stranger and darker parts of quintessential American due mass murderer stories like Bonnie and Clyde and Starkweather-Fugate. While those stories are certainly more significant, they don't touch on the very common experience of what high school represented for so many of is and the dark, dark thoughts we ruminated through and never acted on.

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Zen And The Art Of Starting A Book

At some point in the past, before 2008, I had tried to read Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance and did not make it very far through the beginning pages. I honestly can not remember how long ago it was, but it was likely to have been suggested to me by Craig Hanks during my post-undergrad time when I was so very interested in the philosophy of technology. That would have been 1994, making me 29 years old, and age that you would think that I would have been ripe to read such a book about a philosophical and literal road trip that hinged on a topic I was very interested in at that time. For whatever reason, which I admit that I have forgotten, it didn't take.

While getting ready for a vacation in June of 2008 I recalled how much I enjoyed just reading books during my 2007 vacation and I got it in my mind that I should take some kind of philosophy book with me to read, and for whatever reason this was the book that I picked up. And I am glad I did.

The story, as it is, is ostensibly about the author's cross country motorcycle trip with his friends and his 11 year old son. This is the literal and physical part of the road trip. This is also used as a vehicle for the author, the book's protagonist, to delve into a variety of philosophical ideas by relating a particular idea to a particular happening of the basic physical journey that takes place.

The author's main goal in the book, though, seems to me to be a self-exploration of his internal philosophical ideas and how he has arrived at the ideas he has during the writing of the book itself. He explores his own past, and he initially alludes to a controversial incident in his past which essentially results in him becoming another person. A personality split. And not an amicable split, but one forged in the fires of his burning up of the old person and emerging as someone else.

This is currently where I am in the book (as of 06/26/08), detailed exploration of his past as the other person he was before the split (and perhaps death of) from his other person.

There are many ideas going on in the book, but overall it is a book about philosophy of science and philosophy of technology. The author keeps these ideas intertwining in many ways, and eventually he gets directly to the point of revealing this his old person was born of an interest in science, but ultimately concludes that science cannot answer the questions he continues to come up with. Science has some specific philosophical flaws that the author simply cannot overcome even as a young man and ultimately ends up abandoning science for philosophy (not similar to how I did it, but nonetheless this was something that I also did when push came to show in my undergraduate years).

Where the book has been resonating with me so far is mostly in regards to his explorations about human beings and their relationship with technology in the modern world. This is an area of fascination for me and it has been for a long time, and I can now see why the book was recommended to me since it does address this directly. He distinguishes between "classical" and "romantic" notions that human beings have regarding the world the exist in. The best example he gives of this is that the notion of a cross country motorcycle trip is a romantic human notion while the motorcycle itself in order to exist and run properly is purely a classical item and the result of classical notions. His friends in the story serve as an interesting case study example of people who are not comfortable with the fact that the modern world is largely a classical notion place but that human beings themselves are largely a group of social animals that continue to rely heavily on romantic notions to answer a wide variety of inherently human philosophical questions. He presents as an unacknowledged human conflict that is of dire, direct importance to address since most human beings exist romantically but the modern world in which they live exist and is built upon a whole species' lifetime of constantly building on the classical. While he doesn't (so far) directly say that this is a dualistic and almost adversarial relationship between man as an animal and a part of nature in conflict with man as above and taking advantage of and existing beyond nature, that is certainly there. That man cannot let go of his animal nature of wanting to wander and be free but that man understands the bargain with the classical. The classical lets him survive with the maximum level of safety from the elements in nature that pre-classical man must constantly struggle against simply to survive. Classical lets the romantic flourish because the romantic notion takes more mentality to develop than is available when man must strictly use all of his physical and mental resources to survive at the most basic and minimum level.