Monthly Archives: December 2017
30/12/17 wellness
wellness
(1980’s | doctorese | “well-being”)
“Wellness” is not a synonym for “health,” or even “good health.” Most objections to the term assume that it is and so are easily dismissed, not that even the most principled objections would have stood a chance — the term has routed the field and now is heard everywhere. It goes with holistic, or perhaps alternative or preventive medicine (now you hear “integrative medicine”). The point of wellness is to distinguish itself from conventional ideas of bodily soundness, which involve purging microbes, following rigid, one-size-fits-all guidelines for diet and exercise, and ignoring everything else. From the beginning, practitioners of wellness have preached “Mens sana in corpore sano” (or the other way around), paying due attention to one’s emotional and physical gestalt over antibiotics and cholesterol counts, not that a holistic physician would disregard dangerous symptoms and proven treatments. Nowadays, wellness is most often touted as a result of preventive medicine.
Was the word invented in the seventies? No, the book “Dynamics of Wellness,” published in 1970, cites a psychologist named Dunn for inventing it in 1957 (the New York Times provides a detailed history). The expression became much more common after 1980; as early as 1984 Ronald Reagan urged employers to “sponsor wellness programs that reduce smoking, improve eating habits and promote physical fitness as ways of cutting costs and improving workers’ health” (Associated Press, March 13). A recent post on forbes.com notes, “When corporate wellness programs first took off, the focus was primarily on smoking cessation or weight loss goals. Current wellness programs have come a long way since then –- and program offerings have expanded to focus on more than just the physical aspect of health. Employers are . . . combining more traditional well-being efforts with career development efforts.” Such programs continue to grow thicker on the ground every year, as wellness, like mindfulness, has become popular around the workplace recently. They are both cheap ways to show concern for employees while doing as little as possible to improve working conditions or morale and butting further into everyone’s personal life. On the other hand, wellness programs generally dispense reasonable advice and may actually do some good.
The expression looks to be the sort of crude formation that springs so easily from the mind of a technician or bureaucrat. Find an adjective, glue “-ness” to it, and voilà! a noun. Sometimes, as I have noted elsewhere, this approach has the advantage of creating a term both relatively precise and more or less free of connotation. Other times, it’s just one more blot on the language. “Wellness,” clumsy as so many well-intentioned locutions are, does attempt to name a state of soundness that encompasses peace of mind as well as strength of physique, a comprehensive and balanced picture. And wellness has survived on its own terms as it continues to denote a way of looking at a person’s health that stresses a fuller account of it than you’ll get from your standard health-care provider. Though it is closely related to several other new expressions, it doesn’t cover exactly the same ground as any of them and so can’t be deemed entirely redundant.
Lovely Liz from Queens asked me to point out that the eminent poet and critic John Hollander despised “wellness.” Its unidiomatic sound would naturally have displeased an ear as refined as his, but I don’t know if he would have conceded that the word has a certain use-value. I find myself rolling my eyes at the neologism, but I can’t help but acknowledge with a bit of a grudge that it adds to the language in certain ways as it wounds it in others.
Tags: doctors, English, health, holistic medicine, John Hollander, language, office dynamics, office work, preventive medicine, Ronald Reagan, wellness, words
17/12/17 soft money
soft money
(1980’s | journalese (politics) | “slush fund,” “dirty money”)
An example of a venerable expression that has seen boom times lately, in this case with a significant change in primary meaning driven by a change in circumstances, always a goad to new expressions. In the nineteenth century, “soft money” meant paper money, as opposed to hard money, which was precious metal formed into coins (sometimes known as “specie”). It took several decades before the now taken for granted consensus emerged that paper money is o.k., still not a universal belief. And it is true that if a government goes belly-up, the money it has issued goes with it, whereas gold is always worth something. Nonetheless, we have proven to most people’s satisfaction that it’s possible to run an economy on paper money, untethered to gold or anything at all except the government’s willingness to print it and the people’s willingness to exchange it, even through some heavy-duty financial disasters. (Print money, in this day and age? Now it’s not even visible — nothing more than numbers on a server somewhere. Oops, hope it didn’t get hacked.) Of course, history hasn’t ended, but we’ve kept it up for more than a century now.
When Lovely Liz from Queens nominated this week’s expression (thanks, baby!), I saw at once that she was offering me an opening for more of my brand of acidulous commentary, and it’s impossible to avoid in the case of this term, drenched as it is in political chicanery and malefaction of great wealth. Before we get there we must continue to trace its history, as we note a growth of use in this near-dormant expression in academic circles in the 1960’s. Following a couple of decades of lavish research grants, both public and private, “soft money” came into use to describe funding from such sources as opposed to funding provided for in university budgets. Soft money, while abundant, was subject to vicissitudes; government funding might be reduced upon a change of administration, or corporate funding might find a more useful target at some other school. By the mid-sixties, college administrators were warning each other against excessive dependence on soft money.
In 1979, an apparently minor change in federal campaign finance law introduced soft money as we know it today. In brief, Congress removed caps and eliminated disclosure requirements on donations to state party organizations, while maintaining limits on direct contributions to candidates. But there was nothing to keep state organizations from helping candidates for federal office, so corporations, unions, and PAC’s (political action committees, a brand-new phenomenon) as well as individuals could pay much more for influence than they had before, just in time for the 1980 election. It took a couple of cycles before the new order became a familiar fact of life, but within a decade everyone knew what soft money was. And the rich, whom we now call the one percent, were able to invest astronomical sums in their preferred candidates — almost always right-wing — and force officeholders into servitude, elected by the people at large but owned by only a vanishingly small number of them. By an unfathomable coincidence, wealth has become concentrated at historic levels since the dawn of the soft money era, but that must be an act of God, or the invisible hand, or something. And it’s true that politics is so awash in private funding that when soft money was outlawed by the McCain-Feingold act in 2002, it took little time and less effort for those torrents of contributions to find new channels. Recent Supreme Court decisions have opened the spigot further, and soft money has recently passed the torch to dark money, whose sources are not required to reveal their identity. Could be the Koch Brothers, could be George Soros, could be the Russians. The justices, or some of them, leap to the defense of our sacred right of freedom of spending secured by the First Amendment, while ignoring the public interest in honest politicians, or, if we can’t have that, our need to know who’s buying our elected officials.
Wealthy donors may, of course, withdraw their support; through all its changes of referent soft money has never lost that sense of impermanence. They can decide that they don’t get enough return on investment, or wish to avoid being tied to someone a majority of voters loathe. Better to pour that money into stock buybacks, dividends, and executive compensation than to spend it on unreliable politicians. Hard to imagine the puppetmasters pulling the plug, but it could happen. Especially if the current Republican tax bill, which massively favors the rich as every across-the-board tax cut must, fails to pass, which would require only two or three senators to undergo a spasm of conscience, or fear reprisal at the ballot box. But the reason they’re pushing so desperately to pass a tax cut in the first place is fear of reprisal from wealthy donors.
Tags: campaign finance, computers, corruption, economics, English, hacking, language, money, politics, tax policy, words
03/12/17 laser-focused
laser-focused
(1990’s | journalese? athletese? | “single-minded,” “intent (on)”)
The output of a laser meets a casual definition of “focused”: a light beam formed from many waves, all of the same wavelength, projected through a very narrow opening. There are those who believe that the uniformity of the light waves means that it is incorrect to describe a laser as “focused,” because focusing happens only with light of many different wavelengths, but it’s also true that there are such things as focused lasers. Besides, it’s the uniformity that gives the impression of focus, optics notwithstanding. So it’s not surprising that we took to talk of “laser focus.” I can’t think of any precise noun equivalents from before 1980, except perhaps for “undivided attention,” but we had several closely related concepts, such as “bearing down,” “bound and determined,” “powers of concentration.” It suggests not only purpose but precision, not only concentrating effectively but concentrating on the right thing. “Laser focus” has also done spot duty as a verb for twenty years at least, though it is not used in the imperative, as “focus” by itself is.
The expression seems to have arisen in sportswriting, if you believe LexisNexis (in this case, I’m not sure I do); the first unmistakable instances popped up in articles about boxers in the late eighties (the laser industry trade magazine “Laser Focus” had been around for several years by then). As with “wonk,” Bill Clinton did not invent the expression but helped solidify it in the early nineties when he promised a “laser focus” on the economy. For all that, it does not seem to have become rife until after the turn of the millennium; I don’t recall hearing it until probably after 2010, though it might have crossed my path earlier.
The advent of the CD player, which was for most of us the first practical, everyday use of a laser, helped make this term possible. Lasers were exotic then (they’re still kind of exotic), but there one was in your own home, bringing your favorite tunes to life. There was a vague understanding in the air that a laser was the magical part of the new piece of equipment, much spookier and more advanced than a diamond stylus or magnetic tape. So lasers were ushered into the general consciousness, opening up room for a new figurative expression. A mere thirty years later, “laser-focused” was declared business jargon by Bloomberg News, and it is clearly a term businessmen have picked up, more than politicians, though it is available to anyone now.
We generally hear the term as praise, but calling someone “laser-focused” may just be a nice way of saying they are wearing blinders; that is, it may imply the wrong kind of workaholism or micromanagement. It’s one thing to pour your efforts into reaching a commendable goal, but obsession has its own risks even in the service of a noble cause. I would say the term generally continues to have a positive connotation, but it certainly can suggest something else: an unhealthy involvement in a single pursuit that leads to exclusion or isolation. We don’t hear that when a corporate spokesman boasts of a laser focus on customer service, but when an individual exercises laser focus, we may wonder.
Tags: Bill Clinton, business, CD players, English, focus, language, lasers, obsession, words, work
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