Business People are Murdering the English Language

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business, commentary, english, grammar, ideation, impact, jargon, language, marketing, the ask

Let me begin by stating that I like business people. Most of the ones I know are smart, hard-working, analytical and decisive. They show up on time and get things done. They are not nearly as moody, sensitive or cynical as creative types like me. And to watch a business person manipulate an Excel spreadsheet is to witness an artist at the easel: hiding and un-hiding columns, sorting sales figures and rearranging rows in the same amount of time it takes me to type in a single stock number. They are good with the data.

With that said, I believe that business people – and by “business people” I mean marketers, accountants, product managers, lawyers and anyone else who can explain to you what something like “EBITDA” stands for – pose the biggest threat to the English language since the nonsensical lyrics of Oasis. They just don’t do words well. Not that there’s anything sinister going on. It’s just that business people keep trying to “manage” language the same way they move things around on those digital spreadsheets, using certain words in ways they never were meant to be used.

Take the word, “impact,” for example. It is NOT a verb. It is incorrect to say something like, “We expect the one-time costs of AMCE Corp. buyout to impact net earnings for the third quarter.” Business people started using impact in this fashion many years ago, even though there is a perfectly decent verb – “affect” – that means exactly what they so badly wanted impact to mean.

Sadly, you don’t have to attend an earnings conference to hear liberal and incorrect usage of impact. Everyone makes it a verb nowadays: educators, government leaders, journalists, social workers, sports announcers… Everyone. And those ambitious business people, always trying to stay ahead of the culture, have now made an adjective out of impact. It’s “impactful.” If you haven’t heard that one, stick around. It’s coming to a television near you.

“At the end of the day, we need to maximize synergies that will be impactful to the bottom line. M’kay? Great.”

There are, of course, other examples of words that corporate types have taken hostage, or ones they have simply invented. Take “ideation.” Please. It sprung up a few years ago and is basically a fancy way of saying, “brainstorm,” or, put more plainly, “thinking.” But no middle manager worth his or her six-figure salary would ever say, “let’s schedule a half-day thinking session.” And “brainstorm” would sound almost as quaint. So instead they say, “let’s ideate!” And their business casual-attired colleagues around the conference room table smile and nod knowingly, secure in the sense that their boss is up on the latest business jargon.

The misuse of impact and the creation of ideation are clear impositions on the English language. And there are many others. But there is one taking root in Power Point presentations across the country that is far worse. I would almost dare say it may be the hydrogen bomb of business-ese (which is a word I just made up). I’m talking about the use of “ask” as a noun. As in, “will you be attending the Tuesday afternoon ask that we have scheduled with the Innovation Steering Committee?” Yes. The ask. Formerly know as, “a question.” I am not making this crap up.

It would all sound silly if these language trends didn’t have a way of seeping from the board rooms into the general population. Will people begin saying, “the ask” or “my ask” in regular conversation soon? It’s possible. And if we can’t use a word like that properly, what is the point in talking or communicating or having a common language at all?

The whole mess reminds me of an exchange I once had with my high school English teacher. We were on a trip for the National Forensics League (which is sort of like debate for theater geeks, only less cool). We had been sitting for hours in some school cafeteria, waiting our turn to perform, when I tossed a half-empty Coke at a trash barrel, missing the barrel entirely and splashing the English teacher, who was our luckless chaperone that weekend.

“My bad,” I said with a shrug as my forensics friends snickered.

“My bad? Is that what you just said?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“That,” he said (then he paused for dramatic effect), “is the stupidest, most ignorant thing I have ever heard. I know cocker spaniels who have a better grasp of English than you.”

My teacher was a bit of a pompous tool, but he was right on this count. It’s not okay to use words incorrectly. Most of the time, it makes you sound stupid. And a high school junior who is about to walk into a mostly empty classroom to recite the Clarence Darrow part of Inherit the Wind should really know better.

So should all those professionals with their MBAs, Juris Doctorates and other fancy degrees. Please use proper English, business people. That is all I ask.

“Do You Need to Go Potty?”

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bathroom, children, fatherhood, humor, jayhawks, parenthood, potty, potty training, toddlers, university of kansas

This is a proud time in my household. We are walking around with more spring in our step and our heads held just a little bit higher because, after six months of trying, our three-year-old is potty-trained. I say this with confidence because he has been going Number One and Number Two by himself on the toilet for more than a month now. Oh sure, we still outfit him in pull-ups for bedtime and naps but, really, that’s just a precautionary measure as much as anything. And, yes, we still have the Diaper Genie, but that’s mostly because I have a hard time parting with something that has been such a fixture in my life for the past three years. I’m sure I’ll get past that eventually.

So our son is potty-trained. And, yet, maybe because we are older parents who are slow to adjust to change, my wife and I still ask him the same question at least a dozen times a day: “Do you need to go potty?” We ask this when he wakes up in the morning, after he eats a meal, and when it’s been more than an hour since the last bathroom visit and he seems particularly engrossed in an activity. It’s a question we have been asking for so long, through months of on-again, off-again training, through interminable weekends with potty chart stickers and soiled underwear and crying fits (some of them mine), it is now engrained in our daily routine.

“Do you need to go potty?” one of us asks as soon as we get home from daycare.

Our child responds with the weary look of someone dealing with an elderly relative who has lost all short-term memory and keeps telling the same story over and over.

“I just went potty,” he says.

“All right. Well, just checking.”

“Ooookay,” he says, and heads off to the important task of jumping off the downstairs sofa.

Is this what parenthood is about, parroting the same mundane questions over and over, long after they have lost all relevance and meaning to our offspring? Several years ago, when I was a reporter for The Kansas City Star, I did a telephone interview with a University of Kansas basketball player named Greg Ostertag. It was the typical jock interview, filled with awkward pauses and monosyllabic answers. I can’t even remember what the story was about. What I do recall, however, was that our conversation was punctuated with Ostertag occasionally blurting the words, “Ya poopin’?”

I let it slide the first couple of times he said it. Ostertag was a big, country-boy center who had led the Jayhawks to a Final Four and was also known for an off-the-court incident in which he somehow managed to roll a car over his own foot. An intellectual heavyweight, Ostertag was not. So maybe he was uttering some kind of hillbilly expression with which I was unfamiliar. Maybe he was even making fun of me.

Finally, after the fourth or fifth, “Ya poopin’?” I had to ask what was up. Ostertag laughed and explained that he was in the bathroom, urging his toddler to use the toilet. Then I heard a flush and an excited whoop from the Kansas center. I guessed the kid had finished pooping.

At the time, I found it annoying that someone would conduct an interview with a major daily newspaper reporter while taking a child to the bathroom. Now, 20 years later, I get it. Potty-training, when it’s happening, can take over your parental life. It becomes an obsession that can quickly spiral into purchases of books, toys, stuffed animals and miniature toilets, all in the hope of someday getting your kid to use the bathroom on his or her own.

The good news is, once they learn, you can check that one off your list. Some days, a warm smile will wash over my face as I realize that I may never have to change a dirty diaper again. Still, the question persists:

“Do you need to go potty?”

“No, Daddy. I just did.”

If toddlers could roll their eyes, I’m sure he would.

The Tossed Angel

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angels, fatherhood, humor, jailbreak, marriage, scultures, storytelling, thin lizzy

As I recall, we paid about $45 for the concrete angel. My wife’s best friend had a neighbor who liked to mold sculptures out of cheap concrete. He was a shaggy, middle-aged guy with a nose full of burst capillaries who showed us a few of his sculptures and said he could mold an angel for my wife in about two weeks.

“It’s not as simple as it looks,” he said as we eyed the concrete gnomes, mushrooms and forest animals lining the walls of his garage. “It takes time to do it right.”

The guy made good on his promise and, two weeks later, my wife took home a very realistic depiction of a cherub in flight, one arm held high so that you could hook him to anything sturdy enough to bear his 15-some-odd pounds. We later learned from our friend that her neighbor was a chronic womanizer who practiced his concrete-molding skills on some of his favorite female subjects. His wife found those particular sculptures in a garage closet behind all the smiling gnomes and woodland creatures.

That wasn’t important. What was important is that my wife liked the angel. She hung him from a metal arbor that we put in our backyard, a place where he could keep watch over the starlings, finches and cardinals that frequented our feeders, and where my wife could watch over him through our second-story living room window. She did that sometimes on quiet weekend mornings, drinking coffee and staring out at the birds and the angel and the clematis hanging from the arbor. There were other angels she began collecting soon after we moved into our new home in the northern part of the city. We moved up there after enduring a family tragedy and, in a way, my wife felt the angels might stand guard and keep misfortune from following us to our new home.

One early evening in June, I was spreading black velvet mulch in the garden bed beneath our backyard arbor. It was the end of a long, hot day of watching our one-year-old son, then mowing the lawn, then doing some more yardwork that I’d put off for a few weeks. I had on my ear buds and my iPhone was cranking out Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak album. Everything was peachy: mulch, sweat, bumblebees, The Cowboy Song and occasional sips of water from my giant St. Luke’s Hospital & Women’s Clinic bottle. The only annoying thing, other than the bees, was my tendency to rise up from my work and bump my head against the concrete angel hanging from the arbor. This happened enough times that I started to get a little testy. “Next time I hit my head against that stupid angel, I am going to grab it and throw it as far as I can,” I thought. I might have even said it.

A few minutes later, with “The Boys Are Back in Town” blaring in my cranium, I gathered myself into an upright position and, bam! hit my damn head on that angel again! I knew what I had to do. I picked that cherub up by his wings and tossed him over our picket fence. I took no pleasure in the act. I had told that angel I was going to do it, and damnit, how dare he test me like that! I calmly returned to my work with the mulch.

A few seconds later, I felt a pop on my head. Then another one against my arm. I pulled off my ear buds and looked up at our backyard deck, where my wife and son stood, staring down at me. My wife took another piece of ice from the drink she was holding and threw it at me.

“I saw the whole thing!” she yelled.

“What?”

“Don’t tell me ‘what.’ You know what I’m talking about.”

“Hi, Daddy!” my son squealed, waving a burp towel at me.

“The angel was hitting me on the head,” I explained. “I had to get it out of the way.”

“Oh, the angel hit you in the head and so you threw it.”

“I tossed it.”

“Hi, Daddy!” my son squealed.

She took our boy inside and returned to finish our conversation.

“You have no idea,” my wife hissed, “What an asshole you looked like.”

“Oh, c’mon.”

“It’s broken.”

“It’s not broken. I just tossed it.”

She went back inside the house and, after a few minutes, I walked around the fence and into the tall grass to retrieve the angel. Sure enough, his little arm, the one that had held him aloft, had broken off from the impact of the fall. I took a deep breath and walked into the house to give my wife the news.

“You were right. It’s broken.”

“I told you it was.”

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I know how much you like it.”

“That’s okay,” she said in a way that clearly meant it wasn’t.

“I’ll buy you a new one,” I said.

“Good luck finding the guy who made it.”

“I’m not buying it from him. God knows what he was doing with that concrete.”

“It’s really okay,” she said.

I, of course, did eventually get another concrete angel that we could hang from our arbor, though not one nearly as big and majestic as the old one, which now sits grounded in our garden bed as a reminder that I am not perfect and, yes, sometimes an asshole.

The angel, after the fall.

The Dark Side of Springing Forward

Tags

children, commentary, daylight savings time, fatherhood, government

Okay, so the time change… is it really necessary? I have asked this question of various friends and Facebook contacts in recent days, and no one has been able to give me a compelling reason why our government-mandated time changes twice a year do our modern society any good. If it’s a case of saving electricity or promoting commerce, then why don’t we go to Daylight Savings Time all year long? If it’s about helping the farmers, then how does that work? Seems like they would want more daylight hours in the morning this time of year, not less.

I’m sure there’s a strong case out there for changing the clock twice a year, and I would really like to know what it is. Because “springing forward,” has created just a little bit of havoc in our household. Here is our three-year-old’s sleep schedule for the four days after the time change:

Sunday: took a two-hour afternoon nap; set a personal record by staying up until 11 p.m.

Monday: skipped his afternoon nap; found swaying and muttering like a drunken frat boy when picked up from day care at 5 p.m.; crashed 30 minutes later and slept until 6 a.m. the following morning.

Tuesday: took his afternoon nap; stayed up until 10 p.m.

Wednesday: took his afternoon nap; stayed up until 9 p.m.

So we are seeing some daily progress in the sleep routine, and I am sure we will be back on schedule by week’s end. And, of course, it will be great to have sunlight until 9 p.m. during the summer months. Still, in the near term, it is frustrating to endure this without a clear understanding why most of the country elects to abide by the Daylight Savings and Standard Time calendar.

(Also, it’s just weird to switch to summer hours in early March, when there’s still snow on the ground. A friend recently told me that that moving the DST switch to March was President George W. Bush’s greatest achievement, “because he put a little more sunshine into everyone’s lives.” And, yes, my friend was serious).

So, can anyone give me an explanation as to why we need to have Daylight Savings and Standard Time in this day and age? Anyone? Anyone?

The Many Trials of a Mizzou Fan

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college basketball, college football, humor, kansas, missouri, mizzou, sports

Nebraska’s infamous (and illegal) kicked-ball play against Missouri.

Four nights ago, the University of Missouri’s basketball team enjoyed a thoroughly impressive 93-63 thumping of its new rival, Arkansas, on the hardwood. The win was big because it came against Missouri’s former coach, Mike Anderson, who left Columbia two years prior in the dead of night without so much as a farewell text to his players.

So it was a nice, score-settling victory, which makes me nervous because it means the Tigers will almost certainly lose their next, even bigger game at Tennessee today. And not just because Tennessee is pretty good and Missouri has struggled on the road this season. It’s because following a big win with a wrenching, heart-gouging loss is what the Tigers do. It is their thing, as certain for Missouri as snow storms in the middle of March.

To paraphrase a famous Star Wars droid, we Missouri fans were made to suffer. It is our lot in life. I got my first taste of this as a college freshman. I was an out-of-state student and mostly unfamiliar with Mizzou’s sports traditions, or lack thereof. The football team at the time was very bad, mired in the middle of 13 straight losing seasons. But the basketball team, led by stars like Doug Smith and Anthony Peeler, was a force. The Tigers beat Kansas twice with the nation’s number one ranking on the line. They seemed primed for their first Final Four appearance when things fell apart. There were late-season losses to Oklahoma, Notre Dame and Colorado (really? Colorado?). Peeler went into a shooting slump and his teammates couldn’t seem to pick up the slack.

Still, there was optimism as my dorm mates and I headed to the basement rec room of Hatch Hall to watch the Tigers take on unheralded Northern Iowa in an early afternoon NCAA tournament game. Two hours later, after the Panthers scored a last-second bucket to upset the 3rd-seeded Tigers, my friends and I trudged to the upstairs cafeteria to eat our lunch in stony silence. It was the last day of school before spring break, but you would have thought that three more months of winter had just set in.

That was a painful indoctrination, to be followed by several other soul-crunching Tiger defeats like the 5th Down Game against Colorado, the 1997 “Flea-Kicker” loss to Nebraska and Tyus Edney’s coast-to-coast drive and shot to beat Missouri in a 1995 March Madness game. There’s nothing I can say about these contests that hasn’t been written a hundred times before. Yes, they sucked. And, yes, I remember them all very well.

Angry Missouri students tear down goalposts after losing 5th Down Game

Those were milestone defeats. But there were smaller, equally bizarre losses in between that also ate away at this Mizzou fan’s cast iron heart. During my senior year in 1992, the Colorado Buffalos returned to Columbia for the first time since they needed five downs to beat the Tigers on the last play of the 1990 game. The ’92 rematch was going to be the biggest football game for Missouri in a generation: national television, a first-ever night game at Faurot Field, free admission for any student who wished to attend… It was a sneak peek at big-time football for Missouri. And maybe that was why a cold front blew in just moments before kickoff and blasted freezing rain on the stadium for the entire game. It was early October, but it felt like the middle of February and most fans had retreated to their cars by halftime. The Tigers put up a fight. Down 6-0 late, they got the ball deep in Buffalo territory. A winning touchdown seemed eminent before the ball slipped from quarterback Phil Johnson’s hands and into the arms of a Colorado defender. “Missouri luck,” a friend muttered to me as we stood shivering in the student section.

Tyrus Edney’s game-winning shot for UCLA

There’s been bad luck, or bad judgment, off the field as well. In 1989, Missouri passed on an opportunity to hire Bill Snyder as its football coach. Snyder went down the road instead and turned Kansas State into a national power. Perhaps making up for that mistake, Missouri hired a different Snyder – Duke assistant Quin Snyder – as its basketball coach in 1999. It chose him over a young Tulsa coach named Bill Self, who would go on to lead Kansas to a national championship and enjoy many, many lopsided wins over the Tigers along the way. Missouri luck.

Despite this inglorious history, I remain a proud Mizzou fan. After all, it’s where I went to school and formed some of my closest friendships. And, while the Tigers haven’t loaded up their trophy case with conference championships over the years, they are competitive in both football and basketball, which keeps things interesting from September through March. I sometimes feel sorry for Kansas or Kentucky fans, who usually have nothing to cheer about until Midnight Madness. And don’t they get a little bored with all that basketball success, all those McDonald’s All-Americans churning out championship after championship? Wouldn’t that get a little dull? I’m asking the question because I have no idea if it would or not. That level of sports greatness would be as foreign to me as a day trip to Jupiter.

Also, suffering through Missouri’s pain means that success, when it comes, is especially surprising and sweet. I’ll never forget the football Tigers beating Kansas at Arrowhead Stadium in 2007 and getting the nation’s number one ranking. For a week. There was another great football win over Oklahoma in 2010 – followed by a dispiriting loss to Nebraska. And last year’s basketball season was nothing short of glorious. The Tigers went 30-5 and won their last three Big 12 games to win the conference tournament championship before a noisy, partisan crowd in Kansas City.

There have been a few good sports moments for Ol’ Mizzou.

Of course, they followed that up with a shocking loss to Norfolk State in the first round of the NCAA tournament. But by now, I should have seen that coming. It is my lot in life as a Tigers fan, always waiting for that other boot to come crashing down.

School: Even Less Fun Than It Used to Be

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children, commentary, education, fatherhood, guns, media, parenting, schools, standardized testing, testing, violence

There’s an article this morning about a seven-year-old boy who was suspended for two days from school for chewing his breakfast pastry into the form of a gun and saying, “Bang, bang!” I understand the nation is terrified about gun violence right now, but this punishment seems horrendously excessive. This kid is going to have a school rap sheet about a gun-related suspension on his record. And he’s in the second grade.

This is obviously an extreme example of administrative stupidity, but I worry about schools and what they might be like when my son enters kindergarten in a couple of years. In addition to the hysteria about guns and lock-downs, there’s also the matter of standardized testing. I hear parents of older kids complain about the amount of assigned homework and the pressure to achieve good test scores. Their children are stressed out, scared and, in some cases, depressed. And these are grade school kids! Imagine what the emotional abyss of junior high school is going to be like for them. That, in my mind, is the appropriate time to be frightened, strung out and depressed.

When I was a kid, I hated school. It was hard for me to sit still in the classroom for hours on end and pay attention. Some of my teachers ridiculed me for this and it affected my self confidence for a long time. And this was in the golden days of the 1980s, when the biggest concern for a grade school boy was getting a bathroom pass at 2:50 so he could sit in the stall until the bell mercifully rang ten minutes later. Now, there is so much more to worry about at school – violence, testing, vaccinations, peer pressure, cyber-bullying, ADHD and zero tolerance for kids doing the kinds of stupid things kids will do. Like nibbling a pastry so it takes the shape of a gun.

Boys love guns, by the way. There is no getting around that. So far, we have successfully kept our three-year-old away from toy guns, but eventually he is going to discover one and want to try it out. That doesn’t mean he is a threat to anyone or will even want to own a real gun someday.

Anyway, I worry about what is happening in American schools, which weren’t so great when I was a child and have seemingly become even more miserable, humorless, demanding places. Especially for active boys who have a hard time sitting still and paying attention. I hope I’m wrong about all this and that my son will get to learn and grow in a supportive, encouraging, relatively safe place. But, like scores of parents and educators these days, I have my fears.