Who needs thought when you’ve got jargon

A friend of mine who knows my weakness for jargon and my aspirations to critical thinking sent me a couple of texts the other day which he’d garnered from his work.

Purpose
The WhizzyDooDad is designed to provide customers with a variety of resources that, when used as part of a learning program that incorporates learning courses, will effectively apply professional competencies and reinforce learning content from those courses.

Desired Outcomes

• Application of e-learning to real business situations and needs
• Increased competency and productivity through the application of new skills and knowledge
• Leveraged investment made in learning and classroom training
• Increased use of learning/training programs
• Projects or initiatives can be related to and/or integrated with a blended solution.
• Learners have increased potential for actualizing new skills and behaviours “on the job”.
• Learners take on new roles as facilitators and/or observers of skill transfer
• Promotion of a learning environment/culture.

I’ll spare you the rest; I’ll even spare you my sarcastic analysis.  You’re intelligent.  You can supply your own.

My friend rewrote the thing entirely, without any reference to the original. Here’s an excerpt from the new version:

The introduction of WhizyyDooDad means that those of us who work in the department can easily find someone to give practical advice on whether or not an app [ie a software application - AB] is the best choice for a particular task. It also makes it  easy to find out what apps we already use and save money by choosing the ones we already have licenses for, instead of going out and buying something entirely new which does the same thing. We are no longer limited by what we know as individuals and in our local teams - we all share our knowledge.

The second paragraph isn’t particularly elegant, it still includes jargon and the last sentence is fluff, but it is at least clear fluff.

When I pointed out that the two texts say completely different things - the first talks about customers and training courses and the second talks about finding experts and reducing license costs - he shrugged, so far as you can shrug on Instant Messenger. “That’s what happens when you substitute jargon for thought”, he said. Which is a fair point well made. It is still one hell of a leap from Text A to Text B.

Cats and gender

While I’m on the subject of the Blak Kitteh (who seems to be around again - I glimpsed his back end very briefly the other day swishing out of the cat-flap as I parked my bags in the living room) the one who no longer experiences any gender confusion himself annoys me immensely by always referring to him as “her”. For example: “she came in to eat Tiger’s food the other night” and “I wouldn’t worry about her, she seems to come and go”, and so on. My Ma had a theory of gender in the English language which went “All dogs are he. All cats are she. All veg are greens”. I always felt that there was a bit of a category error sliding in there: “greens” is a noun and not a pronoun after all, but it would have been impertinent to challenge my Ma and I was never impertinent as a child. Ho no. Interestingly, in Gloucestershire water boilers were always “he” as in “‘e’s not bin workin’ since Wen’s’day; ‘e needs the gas-man to come out an’ fix ‘im”.

Let me wrench this post away from these linguistic diversions and back to the point.

The point is that I don’t get on particularly well with female cats, though it may be vice versa of course. If there is going to be any diva-ish behaviour in this house, any prima donna-y flouncing around, then it’s going to be me that does it. If you’re going down hill fast on a hormonal cycle, you might as well free-wheel while you can.

Of course there is no way I can find out if the Blak Kitteh is male or female, but nominally at least, in my idiolect, he’s a he.

I wouldn’t mind so much, but the one who stops over occasionally has a cat which is officially a hermaphrodite. He had to have gender-counselling from the Blue Cross before they’d let him take the cat. But this cat gets the honour of a male pronoun. Now in terms of stroppy prima donna-ish behaviour, this cat could give Naomi Campbell a run for her money. Hermaphrodite or not, this is most definitely a cat which is in touch with its feminine side. The Blak Kitteh on the other hand shows no particular symptoms of gender at all, but if he and I are to rub along at all then so far as I am concerned he is male until proven otherwise.

Just to add another swirl of confusion to the mix, Tiger came originally from a household comprising a womon born womon (to steal a phrase which grates on my teeth) and a male to female transsexual.

Gender. Who needs it?

Rebranding illness

Is it just me who gets the giggles about all those cattle with Blue Tongue disease?

It’s wrong of me to giggle, I know, but I love the directness of the nomenclature of animal diseases: Blue Tongue, Foot and Mouth, Mad Cow, the Staggers, Licky End. Actually the last one was made up by Terry Pratchett, but it is all too plausible isn’t it?

Human diseases used to have accessible names too: St Vitus’ dance, St Anthony’s fire, quinsy, dropsy, Bells palsy, tennis elbow, housemaid’s knee, sleeping sickness, shaking sickness, elephantiasis, croup, scurvy, rickets, whooping cough, cow pox, (any kind of pox, really), the Black Death. Those were names to conjour with.

These days we just have a bunch of bloody acronyms: SARS, AIDS, ADHD, HIV, SIDS.

WTF?

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I was looking for a picture of a medieval doctor to illustrate this post, when I found this painting by John Woodwark; her bottom is just too splendid for me not to share the image with you here.

POP QUIZ - which two words have very similar meanings, one is a six letter word of one syllable the other is a four letter word of two syllables, and the last four letters of the six letter word are the the whole of the four letter word?

Fish, barrel, gun

I do wish my nice organic box scheme wouldn’t assume that I’d like to read a copy of Ethical Living Magazine just because I am too lazy to buy my veg in a supermarket.

It’s a very nice, well-meaning magazine, printed with organic dyes on paper made out of recycled hippies but the poor darlings really cannot think. Ok, I am lying about the dyes and the paper, but the printers apparently have a wormery and a cycling initiative, and I couldn’t make that up.

Here are a few gems:

Lily Lolo Mineral Foundation is “made from pure crushed minerals [and] contains no dyes, harsh chemicals, fillers or oil”. Oh no. It’s made from soft minerals like, er…. well not the nasty harsh sort like flint or caustic soda.

From the letters page, a correspondent quite reasonably describes the difficulty in dealing with the increasing levels of carbon in the atmosphere, saying: “the carbon cycle is fixed and the influx of hydrocarbons [into the atmosphere - ? - AB] cannot be reversed by planting trees”. This is certainly what some of the current research suggests. However the editor replies: “where emissions are unavoidable we use carbon offset projects to help balance out the impact” quite missing the point that her correspondent is making. Planting trees is nice in all sorts of ways and probably a Good Thing. Some of my best friends are trees. However a worrying amount of current research suggests that trees do not, in fact, reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The editor does go on to “accept that the terminology may be misleading”. Bless.

I was rather struck by the jeans made from 99% certified organic cotton and 1% spandex. Oh, and they are £134. Which kinda sums it up really. Being green is really expensive. And if we are going to get the kids interested, we’ll have to use spandex.

However, it’s not the ludicrous cost of the things they advertise which irritates me, it’s the abuse of language. Oh, and the fact that saving the planet is going to require lots and lots of really coherent thinking and a damn good evidence-base.

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On t’other hand, they do have an advertisement for www.hattitrading.co.uk which appears to be an organisation selling handbags made by women who have escaped from human traffickers. Since I’m not immune from woolly thinking myself, I intend to get my next bag from them.

After us, the flood

The users of the internet seem to fall into two categories: the literate and the illiterate. I had hoped that the fact that most communication is by the written word would encourage literacy but it doesn’t seem to. Hopefully the increase in visible illiteracy is because the demographic is expanding to include people who can neither spell nor touch type, and not because we are in fact dumbing down.

I’ve been freecycling a lot of stuff recently, and I have to remind myself that just because someone replies to me thusly …

sorry its late but can pick up tomorrow or sunday evening many thanks shirley [phone number] if you ring me i will ring back to arrange pick up and address

… is no reason not to let them have my stuff.

I’ve been playing Travian for a couple of weeks, and browsing the forums. Travian starts off looking like a rural version of Sim City and ends up being an mmorpg war game. I’m not particularly interested in war games and will probably wander back here whimpering when my villages are destroyed by hormone-enraged 13 year olds who cannot spell.

I can’t work out whether the posters here intend to be as rude and arrogant as they seem:

I’m really confused!
I’m new to Travian so I need answers about this server restart business. I’m in server 4 so I don’t know if it affects me but when they restart the servers is everyone going to lose their cities and have to start all over again? Please help me!

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wow, i’m in an answer stupid questions mood tonight….If server 5 restarts, it has nothing to do with server 4. server 4 just restarted like 3 or 4 months ago… if i’m not mistaken, the last game on server 5 probably already ended if its restarting at the end of the month

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Today is stupid question night, but I guess we really shouldnt’ say anything about this guy because he is new… And it’s not in the manual or anything………

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what about server 3?

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wait.. nvm.. i see now.. server 3 won’t be affected ither..

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Wow don’t get mad at me when you didn’t even answer my question… “when they restart the servers is everyone going to lose their cities and have to start all over again?”

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I answered your question You asked:
I’m in server 4 so I don’t know if it affects me but when they restart the servers is everyone going to lose their cities and have to start all over again? Please help me!Ok. The server restart ONLY AFFECTS the restarted server. It doesn’t affect the other servers the tiniest bit! If the server is restarted, you lose everything on that server. But if your village is not on that server, then you don’t lose anything!

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Alright thanks for your time.

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wow, hot to not become mad when after a stupid question (that was answered few days ago and u can find it on the forum) you don’t mind even a little to read SirensMoon’s first post:Quote:
Today is stupid question night, but I guess we really shouldnt’ say anything about this guy because he is new… And it’s not in the manual or anything………Nothing will affect you. |
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that’s an answer

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What A Noob Question

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There are pages and pages of that sort of exchange. I cannot tell if the posters are:

1. badly served by their own illiteracy
2. writing abruptly because they are writing in a foreign language, (Travian was developed in Germany and is “set” in the Gallic / Teutonic boarder at the “time” of the Roman empire), or
3. 13 and hormones and peer-pressure are undermining their ability to socialise or think

It worries me that illiteracy is a fashion and that the posters could in fact type perfectly sensibly if they chose to.

Then it worries me that this is the highest level of their written communication skills, and they are going to be unleashed into an economy where the blue-collar jobs are all done in China.

I don’t which worries me more. Maybe it’s just a noob question.

Swallow the dictionary

I once told a friend that I was having sex there isn’t a term for. Spent him mad with prurient speculation for a week.

Hah!

Serves him right, the dirty-minded bastard.

I quite like being in a minority so obscure it’s nameless. It makes me feel special, unique and ever so slightly smug. Not attractive attributes, I’ll admit.

I was of course told that I was a SOFFA. Significant-Other, Friends and FAmily. It’s a term I dislike because it’s too generic. It implies that it’s ok for trans-men and women to have social networks or be in emotional or domestic relationships but that no-one would actually want to get down and dirty with them. There’s no suggestion at all of body fluids or pulled muscles. It looks like a typo, an’ I don’ wanna be no fuckin’ typo.

Someone suggested pansexual. This sounds unnecessarily goatish to me. Urbandictionary.com gives:

2. Noun: A person who is sexually interested in other people regardless of gender including males, females, transsexuals, transvestites, gender benders, hermaphrodites, intersexuals, androgynous people, and those with sex-chromosome anomaly such as klinefelter syndrome or turner syndrome.

Ye-es. But I don’t wander around like a bitch in heat. As his gynaecologist told me, “…. you look so straight”. Mind you, he’d had a couple to drink or he wouldn’t have said it. Bless. But the thing is, he’s right, I am pretty straight. I’m just not heterosexual. Or not just heterosexual.

Pansexual 3. Noun: … a person who associates with people of all sexual orientations but is not necessarily interested in sex with people of all sexes or genders ….

That’s for fag-hags who want to graduate.

Then there’s polysexual. Which sounds like parrots to me. Psittacosis should not be a sexually transmitted disease. Urbandictionary.com describes polysexuality thus:

to be attracted to or sexually aroused by a variety of different objects, lifestyles or activities, for example, learning, reading, gardening, massage etc.

Now, I’ll admit that a good pun can make me whimper and I made inappropriate noises at work the first time I saw visual thesaurus , but I’m not actually polysexual. I’m not even that into toys.

Finally, I’ve come across the term Anthrosexual, which urbandictionary.com defines like this:

Anthrosexuality … means being attracted to humans. The word ‘anthro’ comes from the Greek ‘anthropos’ which means ‘man’ or ‘human’.

Anthrosexuality is … like bisexuality, except that it refers to all genders and ‘in-betweens’. It is the blindness to another’s gender or sex. The personality of a person is what attracts an anthosexual person and the connection that is shared between two people.

Anthrosexuals don’t have a list of acceptable genders and lifestyles. Instead, they have no list and see people for what they really are: Human Beings. (My italics).

I can recognise myself in that definition. But I do wish, firstly, that it wasn’t obviously going to be the pose de jour for skinny little gothettes with more sincerity than sense, and secondly that it didn’t sound like sex with a biological weapon.

The one I go to bed with has an unusual back story, but it doesn’t feature Porton Down.

Word Clouds

Hey - how cool is this? These are the words I use here. If you like, it’s a snapshot of my mind. I got it from a site that makes t-shirts. I skipped on the t-shirt, but I really like my word cloud. I’d love it on a mug.

Someone has written a plugin for using with WordPress, but I think it only works if you use WordPress as a stand-alone content editor instead of doing your blogging here on site.

I thought this was cool so I have suggested it in the features forums. I have started a conversation suggesting the Word Cloud plugin and added the suggestion to a separate conversation about tag clouds. Be wary of spamming though, but the two conversations are about different features, though they look very similar. Apparently the thing to so is use the Feedback button at the top right of your Dashboard to put the suggestion to the WordPress Peeps.

Questions - 8 - More NLP Meta Modelling

This considers how to use the NLP Meta Model to give structure and direction to your questions. If you have not come across the Meta Model before, you can find out about it in Questions - 7.

Got that?

Good.

Before we consider the Meta Model in more detail, here is a simple scope warning:

The Meta Model is not the best tool for investigation and analysis. It is easy to get seduced by it because it is so comprehensive and so well documented. Many NLPers seem to assume that it is applicable to all circumstances and that is the only way to work out what questions to use. Bandler and Grinder developed it when observing therapists at work, and they used it to explore people’s own models of the world. But Hookins tried to use it in the analysis and design of computing systems and he found that the Meta Model is not interactive enough to use in a questionnaire and that it is too personal to work in a group setting.

The Meta Model, however, is great for those situations where someone is stuck in a mental loop and simply will not consider any viewpoint other than their own. It’s useful for discussing things with teenagers if you can get them to stop sulking long enough to answer any questions at all. It is of course important to be able to use it gently and conversationally, and not to let it turn you into an inquisitor.

Ok, on to considering it in practice.

Many statements fall into several Meta Model categories, and it is up to the questioner to decide what direction they want to take the conversation, and to choose a question accordingly. For example:

“It is up to you to choose what question to ask”

Revealing the lost peformative:

Who says it is up to me?

Revealing some of the presuppositions:

Do I have the right and the opportunity to ask a question?
Do I have the skill to choose what question to ask?
Is now an appropriate time to ask a question?
Will my question be answered?

Revealing the universal quantifier:

Is it always up to me to choose?

Exploring the nominalization:

So I’m the one with a choice to make, am I?
So the questioning isn’t automatic, then?

Exploring the unspecified verb:

How, specifically, do I choose the question?

Uncovering the referential index:

Whom do I ask?

As you can see, you can go charging off in a vast number of different directions, some of them inward, some of them outward. The Meta-Model helps you to understand what’s missing from a description of the world, but it is up to you to understand what those directions are, and where they might lead you.

It is fun to take a simple statement - any simple statement - and do what I have just done, to look for the Meta Model deletions in it, and to challenge it accordingly. This sort of practice makes it much easier to recognise the questions you can choose in the real-time of real life.

The Meta Model is taught over days or even weeks of NLP training, and I feel rather mean giving you the whole thing in such a huge and indigestible lump.

If you want to explore the Meta Model in more detail, I’d recommend printing out Larsen’s table or the one I put together in Questions - 7 and watch the News with it on your lap. You will soon get a reputation for devastatingly clever insight and cynicism. Play with it like that for a while, and then find yourself a book about NLP which doesn’t aggravate you. (If you thought “ooh look a presupposition about NLP books” then very well done.)

Playing with the Meta Model is such a good starting point for considering the power of questions that I think I am going to leave you with it.

Have fun.

Questions - 7 - The NLP Meta Model - what’s that?

A friend of mine asked me “what brought the Questions on?” - Good question!

Recently, I had to help a colleague consider how to find something out, so I was thinking in a fairly structured way about questions and writing about them helped me do this. I’ve been thinking about questions for a good long while. As I said in the first of these posts, asking questions has been my job one way or another for most of the last 20 years.

I’m almost done. Just this post and one other, and then back to my normal random posts about whatever sparkly thing catches my mind’s eye.

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We have looked at how to use questions for investigation and analysis; we have looked at how to use questions to control a conversation and steer it; we have looked at how to use questions to intensify emotions. Finally, I want to look at one way to use questions to reveal the stuff we hide from ourselves.

Richard Bandler and John Grinder developed the NLP Meta Model of language and presented it to the world in The Structure of Magic. A meta-model is a model of a model, so this is a description of the language people use to describe their world.

There are a large number of detailed and frankly arduous descriptions of the NLP Meta-Model out there. I had been going to write it up myself but I’ve decided to follow the structure given by Loren Larson, though I have created my own examples. The key word here is example. The questions in the right hand column are each just one way of many that could be used to open up and find the hidden content beyond, behind and beneath the statements in the left hand column.

PATTERN	RESPONSE
DISTORTIONS
MIND READING (claiming to know someone else’s thoughts without specifying how you know)
Dogs come when they’re called. Cats take a message and get back to you later. (Mary Bly)	How do you know the cat is taking a message?
LOST PERFORMATIVE (Value judgements where evidence for the judgement is omitted)
Dogs have owners. Cats have staff.	How do you know they have staff? Who says so?
CAUSE & EFFECT (Statement implies that A causes B, or vice versa)
Don’t use cats - they’ll screw up your data. (Anonymous science professor to student)	How will they screw up the data? (Seek evidence) Do they always screw it up, every time? (Seek counter example) But what happens if you want data on cats? (Seek counter example)
COMPLEX EQUIVALENCE (Statement implies that A is equivalent to B)
Long ago, there lived a creature with a voice like a vacuum cleaner. We know little about it, but we do know that it ate cats. (Anon)	Could there be some other reason that cats run away from vacuum cleaners? (Seek counter example) Are the only things that cats run away from creatures that used to eat them long ago? (Seek counter example)
PRESUPPOSITIONS (The statement assumes that something is true or will be true)
The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat. Presuppositions: Owls and cats get on together Pea green is a beautiful colour Owls and cats are capable of going to sea	There are a huge number of ways of attacking presupposiitions: Do owls and cats actually get on together? Is pea green an appropriate colour for a sea-going vessel? I thought cats didn’t like water - do they? etc

GENERALIZATIONS
UNIVERSAL QUANTIFIERS (words like: always, all, every, everyone, never, no one)
Never play cat and mouse games if you’re a mouse. (Don Addis) Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity. (T. S. Elliott)	Never? What would happen if you did? No one at all? Every single human law that ever there was?
MODAL OPERATORS (of possibility: can, will of impossibility: can’t, won’t of necessity: must, have to, it is necessary)
Did St. Francis really preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats. (Rebecca West)	What stopped him? What would have happened if he had?

DELETIONS
NOMINALIZATIONS (verbs that have been made into nouns; the rule is, if it’s a noun and you can’t put it in a wheelbarrow then it’s a nominalization
Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity. (T. S. Elliott)	Whom does he deceive? How is he sauve?
UNSPECIFIED VERBS (verbs where some detail of the action is not specified)
And when the larder’s looted, or the jewel-case is rifled, Or when the milk is missing, or another Peke’s been stifled, Or the greenhouse glass is broken, and the trellis past repair - Ay, there’s the wonder of the thing! Macavity’s not there! (T. S. Elliott).	What’s been looted from the larder? Whose jewel-case? Milk missing from where? How do you stifle a Peke? etc
LACK OF REFERENTIAL INDEX (an action is specified, but WHO is doing the action is left unspecified. Put another way, it’s any non-referring noun phrase)
Macavity’s a Mystery Cat: he’s called “the Hidden Paw”. (T.S. Elliot)	Who calls him “the Hidden Paw”?
COMPARATIVE DELETIONS (A comparison is made, but what it is being compared to is unspecified;included words like: better, worse, more, less, best, worst)
By associating with the cat, one only risks becoming richer. (Collette) One reason we admire cats is for their proficiency in one-upmanship. They always seem to come out on top, no matter what they are doing, or pretend they do. (Barbara Webster)	Richer than whom? Richer than what? On top of what?

It is not easy to come to grips with the Meta Model; as you have seen, there is a lot of it to take in. There is also a real risk that you can end up being intimidating and smart-alecky or humourless if you permit your responses to become too Pavlovian. (Too Pavlovian, how, specifically?).

In the meantime, it is fun to take a statement at random from just about any source such as television, a newspaper or a blog, and run it through the Meta Model to see how many of the categories it fits.

There is a lot to discuss with the Meta Model, so…

… more another day.

Questions - 6 - Using questions to persuade

We took a brief look at the various things a good sales person can achieve with questions, now lets take a brief look at what questions they use.

We’ve already looked at what Hopkins calls “the tie down”. Annoyingly, the entire bloody planet under the age of 30 is using it, innit?

Hopkins considers three other main categories of questions in sales to be

• The Alternate of Choice
• The Porcupine
• The Involvement Question

The Alternate of Choice is a question with two answers, either one of which takes you forward.

Bush: Shall we launch air-strikes against Iraq, or invade with land-troops?
Blair: Oh, er, whatever you think best. Do you think I look more statesmanlike if I hold on to the podium with one hand or two?

By stating the options, the questioner is subtly excluding other options such as - to pluck an example out of the air - not attacking Iraq in the first place or, in Blair’s case, being a self-deluded wanker.

We’ve already met the Porcupine. At its simplest this is merely answering a question with another question.

Bush: Shall we launch air-strikes against Iraq, or invade with land-troops?
Blair: I don’t know. What do you think is best?

But it can be used to regain control of the conversation and point it in another direction

Bush: Shall we launch air-strikes against Iraq, or invade with land-troops?
Blair: What the f***? What makes you think that invading Iraq is a good idea?

Actually, that last one is a dangerous one, because it would let Bush detail his entirely spurious reasons and make them even more convincing, to himself at least. A better way to change direction would have been:

Blair: What the f***? Do you want to be considered a war criminal?

Oh dear. One can but dream. That was all in rather poor taste, innit?

Involvement questions are questions which make the person being questioned imagine themselves in the future.

What would be the minimal amount of paperwork required to grant the rebuilding contracts to Haliburton?

Won’t it be wonderful when people think of you as a Great World Leader for winning what looks like a straight-forward war?

When you’ve unlocked the Iraqui oil fields, will you have a direct majority share-holding in the company that controls them, or will you hide it in a series of investment trusts?

As you can see, sales people use questions in ways which go far beyond the simple investigative questions of Rudyard Kipling, Aristotle and Lewis Carroll.

I feel I owe you an apology for the examples though.

More, in better taste, another day.