A GUIDE TO LANGUAGE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

When I was a graduate student in critical theory we were mockingly advised that if we had a problem expressing our ideas with obfuscating prose we should switch to writing poetry.

I confess that I never fully understood the sarcasm behind that directive but I laughed along with everyone else, confident that we were in the serious business of parsing deep meaning.

I thought about this recently when a friend of mine from school, the poet Tsivait Mzloz, sent me a copy of his latest book, On The Glamour of Being Vague.  Mzloz (pronounced Mees-losh) was the guy in class who consistently questioned the primacy of theory and nagged our professors into defending their aversion to beauty. He knew his way around the Frankfort School and was alone in our class in his ability to read the French Deconstructionists in the original. When he took the advice to become a poet, I remember feeling sorry for him. 

Tsiviat's book is difficult and brilliant, combining insights with speculation all wrapped in a lush fabric of improbable metaphor. I won't bother paraphrasing his complex thesis, it would be, as Cervantes put it, like looking at a Flemish tapestry from the back. But I would recommend reading the lengthy glossary in the end of the book from which, I believe, one could get the gist of his ideas.

Mzloz is a keen observer of language and he has carefully traced the effects of technology, entertainment, the mental health industry and corporate culture on demotic English. Whereas at one time allusive speech and precision were the twin virtues of articulateness, today's talk is a veritable thesaurus of unfocused ambiguity.

Here are a few of his favorite examples:

Empowerment - an inauthentic form of chutzpah (see Authenticity)

Authenticity - a feeble feigning of conviction

Disruption - the profit motive disguised as an ethic

Network (as a verb) - exchanging business cards with an authentic smile (see Authenticity) 

Validate - the enablement of weakness disguised as praise

Vision - the packaging of the past into a recognizable brand (see Brand)

Brand(ing) -the neutering of individuality into an elevator pitch

Resource - a human being

Leadership - the loudest voice in the room while paraphrasing an aphorism from a book on management (see Management)

Management - the effective evasion of personal responsibility

Share - to talk about personal matters with an indifferent stranger
Panel - a group of people sitting on director's chairs who have never heard of Billy Wilder