Soon after the world began, the ancients undertook the construction of an ill-fated ziggurat in the land of Shinar. An edifice of ambitious vertical proportion, it began to encroach upon heaven itself until the deity, concerned for the neighborhood, confounded our forebears' language so they could not communicate and scattered them abroad.
In recent years, mankind has devised means of information transmission so vast and so rapid and so efficient that they would seem to challenge the natural order. But our capacity to communicate nonetheless seems, for some mysterious reason, to have diminished radically.
If not the Tower of Babel, perhaps the Slough of Babble.
(I do not here propose to address the nattering of chat rooms or the bombast of the blogosphere, both beyond hope, but rather commercial communication, wherein cogency not only is important in its own right but also serves to convey professional substance.)
A scant generation ago, in the world of business, stenographers -- who have since gone the way of the great auk -- struggled to transcribe dictation both tedious and tendentious. ("In preparation for the plenary meeting of the board next Tuesday, we need to prepare to carefully and with statistics present the color of a dog food can that. ...")
Clearly what was then required of business folk was that they learn to strop and vigorously employ Occam's razor (after William of Occam, English scholastic philosopher, died 1349?), which requires the elimination of all elements unnecessary for proof or explanation.
Instead, afforded a simple and enticing method of transmission, they have opted to use Redmond's wordchipper (after William of Redmond, the American developer of Word and enabler of e-mail, born 1955) -- which reduces context to mulch.
("on the woof chow i think yellow probalby -- thats what the stats say ... does the board care? ur call")
In fairness to Bill Gates, you can hardly blame the medium. The medium, after all, is not the message. But the very facility and rapidity of e-mail are seductive, and the tendency arises to blurt, rather than to compose -- to confuse the instantaneous with the efficient.
("yup - yellow - go for it . . ill clue the board Not too orangy tho")
Nor should that which is merely brief be construed as that which is truly terse. It is one thing to eliminate elements unnecessary for proof or explanation; it is another to eliminate those that are indeed necessary or to scatter them in syllogistic disarray.
Precision counts. We should therefore switch the channel when we arrive at the workplace and strive to be clear and professional. An appropriately concise version of our e-mail exchange might be: "Dog food: Stats show strongest consumer response to yellow can. Will fwd chart for board presentation. Pls advise next step." And: "Begin first stage packaging initiative, w/o deviation from tested color. Will present to board and apprise of its decision." Pet food is, after all, a business, not a show about nothing.
As a species, we are wont to infer much about the nature and quality of our counterparts from the nuances of their presentation. Gone now are the days of sartorial semiotics, the brazen displays of Liberty ties and Turnbull & Asser shirts. In this casual era of nouveau-kitsch office attire, we present ourselves electronically; we are rarely so profligate with our time as to meet in person. But if we need no longer tailor our togs, we need instead to design our words -- to establish worth and weight, subtly to differentiate ourselves from those other people.
Our business schools have long concentrated on teaching their students how to bend problems they might encounter in the wider world to fit solutions they were being provided in the classroom. It may be time to instill the disciplines of communication.
(BTW if u can dig this IMO u r 2 far gone 2 fix.)
NON DIMINIMUS
Some two thousand years ago, Caesar went and observed and overcame and then rummaged in his supply train for noun cases, looking in particular for the ablative (Latin, of course, had more ablatives than Jupiter has moons) -- only to discover that they had been left behind, beyond the Rubicon. Thus were the conquered northern tribes spared the necessity of declining their nouns.
Modern English, however, contains many borrowings from Legalese, an earlier offshoot from the Indo-European linguistic tree and closer to Latin in both structural complexity and vocabulary. As an unfortunate consequence, we may employ its terminology less than adroitly.
An emergent popular usage, increasingly heard to reflect sophisticated disdain, is to dismiss a matter as diminimus, thus spelled, most often, and pronounced akin to "diminish us." But it is a corruption of the Legalese term "de minimis" (pronounced day MIN-i-meese), from "De minimis non curat lex." (Loosely translated, "The law does not care about trifles.") The Legalese is closely derived from the Latin, in which "de" - followed by the ablative - means "about" or "concerning" and in which "minimis" is the ablative plural superlative of the adjective "parvum," meaning "small" or "little."
But perhaps, given today's permissive lexicon, "diminimus non curat lector." Lector -- as in "reader." (Not you, of course.)
IN CLOSING, WITHOUT WAX
Even Rome gave birth to urban legends. In its ancient shops, potters removed their artifacts from the kiln and inspected them for flaws, filling pits and cracks with wax before the items were glazed. Those that were flawless, therefore, were "sine cera" -- without wax -- a locution some philologists suggest has become, in English, the word "sincere."
Well, some philologists can be wrong. The word derives, rather prosaically, from the Latin "sincerus," meaning "sound" or "uncorrupt," the basis, no doubt, for its adverbial usage to close business correspondence. But the concept of its origin as a metric for quality of execution is engaging.
And so, to employ that felicitous, if apocryphal, derivation, this column is ... yours, without wax.
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