PARVUM OPUS

Number 5

GHOTI HELL

Maybe you’ve run across this little word game that illustrates some of the peculiarities of English spelling: How do you spell “fish”? G-H-O-T-I ~ GH as in “rough;” O as in “women;” TI as in “motion” ~ fish. Ghoti uses English, but it’s not really English. Getting meaning out of it is a trick.

Now look at what I call a ghoti hell sentence, i.e. an example of typical business writing, and see if it has a real English meaning:

“We synergistically and proactively leverage scalable resources to drive actionable solutions that will revolutionize value-added technology for our customers to utilize in their integration of tomorrow’s mission-critical deliverables.”

I confess: I can’t translate this because I made it up and it doesn’t mean anything. But we’ve all read the same kind of thing. Sometimes we’ve written it.* We want to sound like our peers, and to sound as if we know what’s going on. But this kind of sentence is packed so full of so much badness, it’s hard to say enough bad things about it. Almost every word in this sentence over two syllables is vague, meaningless, trite (add your own adjectives), but I will comment only on some of them.

• “Proactive” has taken over but does it mean “pre-emptive”, “aggressive”, or merely “active” (as compared to passive)?
• Does “scalable” mean you can add to or subtract from the size of the thing or the operation? Isn’t that true of nearly everything?
• I covered “actionable” in the first issue of Parvum Opus; it’s the worst of this lot.
• When I first started finding the word “solutions” in business writing I was confused. Is it software? Is it a complete computer system? Is it good advice?
• “Value-added” also has a precise meaning in economic theory ~ you could look it up ~ but it does not add value to your sentence if all you mean is that you’re offering your customers services or adding product features, which should always the case if you’re selling something more than a stone. Remember the folk tale about stone soup? Even pet rocks were sold in cute boxes and maybe had a little paint added.
• “Utilize” has a precise meaning: to make something useful that was previously useless. “Use” is almost always the more accurate, and always the less pretentious, word to use.
• “Mission-critical” makes me think of business people looking tense and important around a space shuttle launch. Anyway, what isn’t critical to your “mission”?
• “Deliverables” are things that could be delivered. Perhaps you sell manufacturable deliverables ~ it does not inspire confidence.

The words in the sentence are supposed to stand for ideas, as the letters in fish and ghoti stand for sounds. But these “ideas” stray so far from the concrete world that all they can convey is a vague feeling about the world ~ not even that, only a vague feeling about the writer.

True story: I once knew a young man who took over the successful business his immigrant grandfather had started: Acme Broom and Brush (it wasn’t really “Acme” but the name has been changed for the usual reasons). He changed the old company name to Acme Synergistics. Now, you knew what you were dealing with when you saw “Acme Broom and Brush” painted on the side of the building. They made brooms and brushes, and you might have inferred that they also sold other cleaning supplies. But Acme Synergistics . . . who knows? They’re not in the same old location now; did they stop making the brooms, losing synergy and succumbing to entropy, perhaps? I hope not; they were good brooms.

* See Dilbert’s Mission Statement Generator (www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/games/career/bin/ms.cgi). I didn’t use it to write the example above ~ didn’t have to; it’s seeped into my blood now.

Copyright Rhonda Keith 2003. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but it is permissible to forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

Parvum Opus is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services (www.keithops.us).

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