Obfuscation is alive and well in the corporate world. Molly Young writes in New York Magazine about the ways the Millenial generation of white-collar workers replicate the communication patterns of the organization man and woman.

Silicon Valley

She reviews Anna Weiners’ memoir Uncanny Valley about life in San Francisco during the current tech bubble:

…the scent of moneyed Bay Area in the mid-2010s: kombucha, office dog, freshly unwrapped USB cable…the lofty ambitions of her company, its cushy amenities, the casual misogyny that surrounds her like a cloud of gnats.

Wiener describes watching her peers attend silent-meditation retreats, take LSD, discuss Stoicism, and practice Reiki at parties. She tries ecstatic dance, gulps nootropics, and accepts a “cautious, fully-clothed back massage” from her company’s in-house masseuse. She encounters a man who self-identifies as a Japanese raccoon dog.

Only, as they say, in San Francisco. Or is it? Her description of the language employed is universal:

People used a sort of nonlanguage, which was neither beautiful nor especially efficient: a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime metaphors, inflated with self-importance. Calls to action; front lines and trenches; blitzscaling. Companies didn’t fail, they died.

Weiner’s term for this is garbage language. More accurate than jargon or buzzwords since it is produced mindlessly and stinks. She notes how these terms warp and impede language, and permeate “the ways we think of our jobs and shapes our identities as workers.”

Etymology

Down the years, Weiner notes, garbage language has taken different forms:

• In the 1980s it smelled of Wall Street: leverage, stakeholder, value-add.
• The rise of high-tech introduced computing and gaming metaphors: bandwidth, hack, the concept of double-clicking on something, of talking off-line.
• In the 1990s Clayton Christensen introduced the term disruptive.
• By the turn of the century, New Age terms arrived: lean-in, conscious choices.
• Then there are aviation terms: holding-pattern, discussing something at the 30,000-foot level.

Further characteristics include:

…verbs and adjectives shoved into nounhood (ask, win, fail, refresh, regroup, creative, sync, touchbase), nouns shoved into verbhood (whiteboard, bucket), and a heap of nonwords that, through force of repetition, became wordlike (complexify, co-execute, replatform, shareability, directionality).

WeWork

Young takes the WeWork SEC prospectus to task for it’s “fidelity to incoherence” — a 200,000-word tomb that overflows with windy passages such as:

We are a community company committed to maximum global impact. Our mission is to elevate the world’s consciousness. We have built a worldwide platform that supports growth, shared experiences and true success.

Why CEOs speak like idiots

In a passage worth quoting at length, Young zeros in on the dilemma those in the C-Suite face:

Edith Wharton[wrote a] story where a character observes the constraints of speaking a foreign tongue: “Don’t you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time, not what one wants to, but what one can?” To put it another way: Do CEOs act like jerks because they are jerks, or because the language of management will create a jerk of anyone eventually? If garbage language is a form of self-marketing, then a CEO must find it especially tempting to conceal the unpleasant parts of his or her job — the necessary whip-cracking — in a pile of verbal fluff.

Author Jessica Helfand lists commonly abused words and phrases, which she claims younger workers cling to because they give the illusion of authority. She classifies them as:

• Hyphenated Mash-ups (omni-channel, level-setting, business-critical),
• Compound Phrases (email blast, integrated deck, pain point, deep dive), and
• Conceptual Hybrids (“shooting” someone an email, “looping” someone in).

Delusion as an Asset

Young concludes by quoting Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense:

A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

The German philosopher made the ironic suggestion that we drop all pretense at ‘functional’ speak and resort to poetry. Something, Young concludes, that would be less of a threat than the garbage spoken in the corporate world today, where:

The meaningful threat of garbage language — the reason it is not just annoying but malevolent — is that it confirms delusion as an asset in the workplace.

As I’ve noted before, the UK’s Financial Times has none of the reticence of other publications such as the WSJ in employing good Anglo Saxon terms where appropriate. Unlike American publications, they will print the work ‘fuck’ in articles.

I see this is a word that’s also freely employed by The Guardian. In her May 31, 2019 opinion piece on the current British Brexit brouhaha, columnist Marina Hyde outdoes the FT in the unrestricted use of the word:

Across all candidates there is an absolute refusal to admit Brexit is a mass Tory sex game that’s gone badly wrong. See modernity’s Matt Hancock, who this week attempted to attack Boris Johnson with the words: “To the people who say ‘fuck business’, I say fuck fuck business.” Gut response to this is: life, no parole. But for those who believe Matt’s crime should be in some way understood, this grammatical construction is known as the “double fuckative”. Contrary to assumption, there are policy positions beyond it – for instance “fuck the fucker of fuck business”, and “fuck fucking the fucker of fuck business”. Don’t ask what they mean – just let them mist you like three fragrant sprays of Matt by Matt Hancock.

My response to such robust commentary in a ‘proper’ English newspaper: Fuck Me!

It’s over dozen years since I first profiled The King of Hay-on-Wye and then listed the Top 197 Tweets from the 2008 Hay Festival. I’ve finally made the pilgrimage to the little Welsh-border village where books are celebrated. While Richard Booth is no longer King, having sold his various properties and suffered serious health challenges, the village has thrived and the festival grown enormously from the first event in 1988 that attracted a few thousand, to the hundred-thousand plus who attend today.

Woodstock for the Mind

President Bill Clinton famously compared the festival to the seminal 60’s rock festival. Absent mud, drugs and nudity, Hay delivers a high to bibliophiles. The loos are clean, the food exquisite, the literature wide-ranging.

Over a three day period, I heard presentations from:

• The first man to circumnavigate the world non-stop in a yacht;
• An Oxford professor deliver a magisterial review of How the Classics Made Shakespeare;
• A radical firebrand outline three dimensions of freedom (liberty,equality and accountability);
• A Harvard professor extol the virtues of psychedelics (no, not a resurrected Tim Leary, a different Harvard prof, equally articulate, but more judicious in recommending dosage); and
• The nephew of my oldest friend deliver a funny and challenging presentation to 1,700 people on ways to stay sane on a planet that makes us mad.

That, and a compelling hour of some of Britain’s finest actors reading Speeches That Changed the World — which I’ll review in a separate blog post.

Whites Only?

The British do this kind of thing so well. However, I couldn’t help noticing that the festival appealed almost exclusively to a certain demographic — the educated Hampstead Thinkers lampooned by Private Eye were there in large numbers. Radical chic was everywhere. I doubt many voted for Brexit. Any mention of Trump elicited chortles. And it was, without doubt, the whitest audience I’ve seen in a long, long time. While there’s obviously no White’s Only policy, one did wonder where the authors of color and their audiences were.

In Praise of Hay

Away from the Festival crowds, the delightful village of Hay-on-Wye offered great food in a range of pubs and cafes, bookshops everywhere, and pleasant riverside walks. The weather was glorious. Since I slept in a yurt in a farmer’s field this made the experience tolerable.

How The Light Gets In

My one regret this visit is that I did not know about a companion festival held May 24-27 at Hay. The How The Light Gets In festival (named in honor of a Leonard Cohen lyric) is billed as the world’s largest philosophy and music festival. This might be to the Literature Festival what Burning Man is to Woodstock. For those who like their Hay with a nightly rave thrown in.

Hay Player

For anyone curious about the content of the Literature Festival, an annual subscription to the online Hay Player costs just £10.00 and allows you to play as much audio and film from past festivals as you like. Considering the average ticket for just one talk at the Festival is around a tenner, this is a great bargain.

Plus, you won’t need to sleep in a yurt.

The Chicago Tribune has reviewed the play ‘Bigmouth’ (created by the Antwerp, Belgium-based SKaGeN) currently on stage in Chicago. It’s a one-man tour de force by Belgian actor Valentijn Dhaenens who delivers extracts of political speeches from the time of the Greeks to the 21st century. Dhaenens speaks in English, German, Greek, Flemish, French, Italian and the unique patois of Ann Coulter.

He appears onstage behind a table configured with nine microphones, reciting a script composed of the words of the Grand Inquisitor, Nicola Sacco, Socrates, Joseph Goebbels, Gen. George S. Patton, Pericles, Baudouin of Belgium, Patrice Lumumba, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Louis Farrakhan, Osama bin Laden, Frank Vanhecke, George W. Bush and, finally, Coulter.

The Tribune observes that

There is no greater tool in the promotion of hate, disarray, retribution, racism, disunity and fascism than lofty rhetoric. Most of the speakers, of course, did not promote such things, but some did… What makes this show so daring is how Dhaenens works to show you the similarity of rhetoric devices across ideologies or, to put that another way, how history teaches us that it is near impossible to separate good and evil people merely by listening to the words they choose to deliver. Why? Because, as Dhaenens shows us by pairing, say, Goebbels with Patton, the fascists long ago learned the soft-pedal tricks of rhetorical power.

The performance reveals how the tricks of rhetoric have remained unchanged since the dawn of language. They can be deployed both for good and bad purposes.

If you’d like to sample the show check out this interview with Dhaenens:

I’m continually amazed by the hidden gems buried in the pink pages of the Financial Times. Today’s edition has a fascinating article on the manner in which auto companies protect their fleets of new vehicles parked in the open at distribution centers in places at risk of hailstones.

It seems VW and Nissan have installed cannons which fire shockwaves into the air that can actually prevent the formation of damaging hail stones that might rain down on the new vehicles.

Unfortunately, the weather-altering technology has deprived local farmers of much-needed rain, causing droughts. The farmers are suing.

In the spirit of compromise (perhaps learned as a result of the unfortunate emissions scandal) VW are silencing the cannons and installing protective “anti-hail nets” above the cars.

Business Insider notes that the use of cannons to influence the weather goes back to the time of the Romans

Herodotus and Caesar made note of the fact that barbarian tribes tried to shoot arrows at oncoming storms. In parts of Europe, guns were used to shoot at storms, until Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa prohibited the practice in 1750 — apparently, it was a source of complaints by neighbors of the storm shooters, who were upset about the way the weather changed as a result.

If the technology is so effective, one wonders why Flanders was so darned wet when the guns of August split the air during the First World War.

I’ve noted before that the Financial Times — the British equivalent of the Wall Street Journal — isn’t reticent about treating readers as adults and using four-letter words when appropriate.

The latest example from today’s edition is in a wonderful review of the Womad festival where they mention French singer Camille did a cover of the Dead Kennedy’s song “Too Drunk to Fuck”, and, yes, the title was printed in the British financial newspaper in full, not F*** as most newspapers would, leaving us to guess: Too Drunk to Feel? to Flow? to Fake?

Perhaps, as someone once told me, it’s because with a British accent even “Fuck” sounds profound.

Click picture to enlarge..

Anyway, here’s Camilla, clearly not too drunk to sing.

Long before Lululemon, Bikram Hot Yoga and the ubiquitous downward facing dog, yoga was being taught in small studios in San Francisco, New York and the Hudson River Valley. Just as Lululemon struggled to contain the reputational damage of the ‘sheer pants’ scandal and Bikram Choudhury became embroiled in lawsuits, the man who opened the first yoga studios in the nation back in the early 1900’s was a lightening rod for controversy.

The story of how yoga as we know it came to America is told in a fascinating and very readable book, The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America by Robert Love.

The man the tabloid press of the day branded ‘Oom the Omnipotent’ was born Perry Baker in small town Iowa in 1876. Before he was 20 he’d changed his name to Pierre Bernard, met an Indian mystic named Sylvais Hamati, and attained notoriety by subjecting himself to tongue and lip piercings (allowing his lip and nose to be sewn together!) while apparently feeling no pain in a self-induced trance.

Bernard became a serious student of Hatha yoga derived from Vedic and Sanskrit teachings at a time when most Americans were even more ignorant of religions other than bedrock Christianity than they are today. This was even more remarkable since British India regarded Hatha yoga, with its well-known asanas or postures, as declasse.

Bernard fully embraced the Tantrick (or Tantric) forms of practice that included sacramental sexual union: a massive reputational risk in the Puritanical climate of the 1900’s (or even the more tolerant 1970s, as other teachers were to discover). Despite, or perhaps because of, the success of his teaching in helping society ladies and the idle rich find purpose in life, he was pursued in court and hounded in the press.

He moved from San Francisco to Seattle, and eventually settled on the East Coast, first in Manhattan then in the rural Hudson River Valley village of Nyack, where he became a landowner and opened a country club offering members everything from daily yoga to enemas, circuses and all-night parties.

He counted several members of the Vanderbilt family among his patrons. Among his detractors were blue blood families convinced their daughters were being seduced by a charlatan. Charges ranged from indecency (holding classes where female students shed girdles and garters for something more free form, although a world away from Lululemon tights) through to running a white slavery operation (one of the pet fears of that age).

The man who Alan Watts — perhaps recognizing a kindred spirit — described as a “phenomenal rascal master” influenced the next generation of yoga teachers. These included Ida Rolf, the founder of ‘Rolfing’, and Bernard’s wife Blanche DeVris, who taught yoga to Anthony Quinn and Henry Fonda among others.

Bernard died in solitude in 1955, having made and lost multiple fortunes, created a private zoo, sponsored baseball teams, built the finest library of esoteric literature of the time, championed the study of Sanskrit, and much more.

Robert Love has written a fascinating, exceptionally well researched book. He notes:

…what intrigued Americans about Bernard was not merely the Oom notoriety and the flamboyant weirdness. It was the question of whether these trappings of wealth, his fantastic life — elephants, tigers, circuses, Vanderbilt heiresses, and everywhere the scent of sex — might actually be the result of an intense and authentic spiritual pursuit.”

It was, and is.

Fiona Sturges has a great weekly column in the Financial Times reviewing podcasts. This week she highlights The Atomic Hobo by British journalist, cold war specialist and self-confessed “nuke geek” Julie McDowall.

Julie has an engaging Scottish accent, which adds a degree of surrealism to the subject of her regular podcasts: the ways in which Britain and the US prepared for nuclear attack during the cold war. So far, themes have included the disposal of the dead (in Britain, councils stockpiled shrouds); how to keep survivors calm in the bunker (pills, mostly); food distribution; and the fate of family pets.

Certain speechwriters are employed to draft ‘red file’ talks that will be delivered in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Thankfully, those statements have, so far, remained filed away.

To hear how the threat of nuclear war has influenced people to date, check out Julie’s great podcast.

An wonderfully acerbic column by Jo Ellison in the Weekend FT alerted me to the fact that the good folks at Pantone have announced that the ‘Color of the Year’ for 2018 is Pantone 18-3838 Ultra Violet, which is subtly different from the Blue Iris (18-3943) that was color of the year 10 years earlier. It replaces the shade of green that was the color of 2017.

Pantones’ executive director waxes eloquent about the relevance of this for 2018:

Ellison is having none of this. To her

It makes me think of wizards and wacky shed-dwelling craftspeople and the type of people with gnarly toenails who congregate at sunrise to take part in ancient ceremonies involving runic stones. It’s the colour adored by “open-minded” people who move out of London to give their children better educational opportunities, and end up whittling nose whistles in Brighton.

There is, however, a long association of purple/violet with higher purpose, being both the color of Royalty (not known for nose whistle whittling) as well as the sahasrara or crown chakra. As I wrote back in 2006, the crown chakra sits on or above the physical top of the head. It relates to consciousness as pure awareness. It is our connection to the greater world beyond, to a timeless, spaceless place of all-knowing. When developed, this chakra brings us knowledge, wisdom, understanding, spiritual connection, and bliss.

Back then, I asked speechwriters to consider to what extent does anything in your speech really mean a damn in the big scheme of things? It’s refreshing to see that Pantone is asking the same questions today.

I was amazed to hear mention of kombucha on the August 31st edition of the long-running English radio soap The Archers. Two of the village women are in a competitive keifer (pronounced “kaa-fear” in an Ambridge burr apparently, not ‘kee-fer” as in the USA) making competition and a neighbor who’d been visiting farm stores in and around Boston (Mass) made a reference to the “fermented tea” he’d sampled Stateside.

I’ve long anticipated kombucha becoming popular in England, especially as it tastes rather like Scrumpy. Maybe mention on The Archers heralds the start of more general availability.

I’ve brewed my own ‘booch for over five years can heartily recommend it as a healthy option to all those pints of Shires they drink down at the Bull.