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Lex maniac

“Investigating changes in American English vocabulary over the last 50 years”

Tag Archives: metric system

July 11, 2021 metric

metric

(1990’s | businese | “statistic,” “number,” “yardstick,” “standard,” “scale,” “category”)

Remember the metric system? You’re alone. Except for two-liter soda bottles, ordinary Americans have remained safely cocooned from dreaded decimal measurements. Well, gather ’round, kids. When I was a boy, we actually learned the metric system in school. We haven’t had much occasion to use it since, but we added the word to our active vocabulary, and we have an entirely new use for it: now a noun, omnipresent wherever numbers are crunched. At first I thought it was simple, but it has a sneaky range to it, sewing up several different meanings (see above) in one short, easily uttered word. It is successful because it covers a lot of ground.

The word was not used commonly as a noun before 1990; some time during that decade today’s meaning arose, or at least occurred far more frequently, in the business press. Metrics were the glue that held all the other employee relations buzzwords together, because there have to be official, defined standards for everything that you might be judged on. All of which means that decisions about what to metric-ize have both local and wider political significance; DEI metrics are very fashionable this year. Any metric is only as good as the intelligence of its designers, and as reliable as the data collected.

“Performance metric” has a more specific and sinister application. A performance metric tells the boss whether the workers are productive — in other words, whether to crack down on them or not. The purpose of performance metrics is not to reward good employees but to find reasons to get rid of the ones you don’t like. The more detailed and thoroughgoing your data, the more intrusive you have to be to get it. There are also metrics to judge the performance of executives, of course, but management may choose not to pay attention to those.

They are not identical, but the businese use of “metric” reminds me a lot of “analytics” as used in baseball: roughly, making decisions about roster, strategy, etc. based on statistical analysis, correlation, and calculation. Both terms strain in the same direction, toward data-driven policy and action. While “analytics” has become the word for the entire discipline as practiced in major league front offices, “metrics” has not become a separate study — although figuring out what to measure and how to combine your measurements is its own science. The word could take on wider responsibilities, but so far it hasn’t.

Final note: There’s a significant distinction between a system of measurement and a unit of measurement. Metrics are units, never the systems that bind them together. They provide the details that make up the big picture, with each metric adding its mite to the common store. In the case of “metric system,” the most common adjectival use, the word encompasses rather than distinguishes.

This week’s expression comes to you courtesy of Marc from Palo Alto, a first-time contributor, although he didn’t know he was contributing. Lex Maniac takes ’em where he can get ’em.

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September 27, 2020 last mile

last mile

(1980’s | merchandese? | “home stretch”)

Often, an expression commonly understood to apply solely in the physical world loses its corporeality and takes a metaphorical cast (in fact, I covered one only last week). Think of an expression like “blow up in your face,” which suggests literally an explosion marring one’s countenance, but in everyday use it has nothing to do with dynamite. “Last mile” has wandered along both sides of the body/abstraction divide. Its original referent was macabre enough — the walk to the death chamber, after which the convict will walk no more. That’s pretty darn corporeal, yet the phrase has a powerful poetic effect, subtly reinforcing a grim moment. But by 1990, it had become more mundane: making telephone and internet service available to far-flung customers after the last trunk line (or whatever) petered out. Pretty incorporeal, right? Cables, yes, but they’re carrying electrons and such, not the sort of thing you can throw into a truck and drop off miles away. But by now the trucks have won, as the term has tied itself firmly to the physical world; you can still use it to talk about communications, but “distribution assets” (warehouses) get much more attention as vans clog our neighborhoods. Delivery service is one of few economic growth areas this year, and clever investors have already moved into last-mile logistics, real estate, etc. Last-mile funding (or financing) is aimed at students or startups that are close to reaching their goal but have run short of money.

“The last mile,” once very evocative, has become disappointingly earthbound. Whose idea was it to turn the walk to the electric chair into getting the merchandise to customers? Was it solely a matter of ignorance, initiated by someone who had no idea what they were messing with? Why not “last leg,” or “final flurry,” or just “outermost network”? It’s hard to believe that anyone familiar with the older meaning would adapt it so blithely to delivering telephone service or goods from Amazon. I didn’t find any sign of transitional or intermediate forms, so I’m betting techie illiteracy was the cause. Not a very satisfying explanation, but life is rarely as compelling as art.

As a noun or adjective, “last mile” is probably more common than it has ever been. It’s what I’d call a stubborn expression; it doesn’t absorb new meanings easily and steadfastly resists the urge to spread out. It may have found a permanent home now that COVID-19 has convinced millions more that on-line is the way to shop; if so, you can be sure it will stick with it. Another stubborn quality: “last mile” has throughout its lifetime borne a single meaning at a time. For decades, it was a prisoner’s phrase. The incidence of capital punishment dropped, which opened it up for the telecom industry. They grabbed it and shook it around for a decade or so, at which time (coinciding roughly with the beginning of large-scale internet sales) the shippers and shoppers got hold of it. As a new usage takes over, the old ones seem to disappear, or at least dwindle to near nothing.

We’ve gotten considerable mileage out of “mile.” There’s “go the extra mile” (which we owe to Matthew 5:41), “walk a mile in another’s shoes” (which I was taught as a Native American proverb), “give him an inch and he’ll take a mile” (or “ell,” as my 1888 dictionary of proverbs renders it), “talk a mile a minute,” “the mile-high city.” The U.S. may never convert fully to the metric system, but even if we do, we’ll carry the marks of the English system for many years. “I love you, a cubic meter and a liter”? I don’t think so.

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September 29, 2011 deer-in-the-headlights look, y2k

deer-in-the-headlights look

(1990’s | journalese | “consternation,” “visible panic”)

This expression doesn’t really present any difficulty when it comes to meaning or origin (here’s a good account). It sprang from descriptions of Dan Quayle’s performance in encounters with the media, particularly the vice-presidential debate with Lloyd Bentsen, during the 1988 campaign. It turns up only rarely in Google Books or LexisNexis before then, and it’s almost always literal. Certainly the expression rode Quayle’s coattails to popularity. It’s quite evocative, describing the kind of panic that paralyzes, a dumbstruck, flustered, disoriented helplessness resulting from an unexpected threat of some kind (although it often arises from an innocuous question). In Quayle’s honor, it is still often applied to public figures stumped by a question or situation. Perhaps the phrase will get a fresh boost from Levi Johnston’s new book, which takes it as its title.

This phrase may lose its precision over time and start to denote a more general state of fear or uncertainty. I collected this example from Newsday (September 22, 2011), in a profile of a family hit hard by the recession: “This time, his hunt for work hit a brick wall — a tanking economy. She calls it their ‘deer in the headlights’ moment.” Here the phrase clearly means something other than sudden panic caused by an unforeseen crisis. It’s an isolated instance, but I can think of several expressions that have gone from quite specific to very loose (to name three that I’ve covered, “learning curve,” “narrative,” and “ramp up“). After twenty years and counting of regular use, “deer in the headlights” may be ripe for the same treatment.

Cars and deer have coexisted for a long time, but this phrase and its variants effectively didn’t exist before 1988. I wonder if that’s partly because we encounter deer while driving at night more often than we used to. I would not deny that Quayle’s weakness as a speaker was the prime mover, but I suspect this is a word, like “road rage,” that we hear more now because it alludes to a more common occurrence. For the last sixty years, all over the country, we have been carving housing developments out of woodlands. Deer do best living on the edges of woods, where they have easy access to food and cover, so every new house backing on a woodlot, or every new development surrounded by woods, creates more deer habitat. More deer, more cars, more roads — couldn’t that add up to more people experiencing deer in the headlights firsthand?

y2k

(1990’s | computerese | “year 2000″)

If you are under eighteen, you probably don’t remember the Y2K crisis, or millennium bug, at least not very well. You started hearing “Y2K” in the mid-1990’s, and it became resoundingly commonplace within a year or two. It was all about how computers interpreted dates and whether “00″ would be understood as 1900 or 2000. There was nothing technically challenging about it; even people who hyperventilate around computers could grasp the problem. And it wasn’t technically difficult to fix, for the most part — the hard part was finding enough programmers to correct all those millions of lines of code. But cascading choruses of experts issued wave after wave of solemn warnings, and we all remained at least a little nervous as 1999 wound down, wondering how bad it would be. It wasn’t bad, probably because, as my brother-in-law the computer maven pointed out, the industry recognized and sized up the problem well in advance and mobilized the necessary resources to fix it. But if you’re one of those people who think the system never really works, you can say the whole thing was a put-up job — a manufactured crisis that never posed any real threat.

Now “Y2K” normally refers to the consequences of two-digit date entry and the efforts to head them off, rather than being simply an abbreviation for the portentous “year 2000.” It hasn’t shown any signs of becoming a synonym for “overhyped problem” or “fizzle,” and my guess is that if hasn’t by now it probably won’t. I’ve seen it used to refer simply to the calendar year, but that is less common and not very stylish.

K, M, or G? My girlfriend pointed out that if a science fiction writer had dreamed up the millennium bug scenario in the sixties, she would have called it “Y2M” rather than “Y2K.” “M” was once a quick way to say one thousand (notice how our Roman numerals have gotten simpler in the last decade?); “G” (for “grand”) was used specifically for money — 5 G’s meant $5,000 — and there’s still a candy bar called “100 Grand,” I think (formerly “$100,000 Bar”). (While I’m on the subject, you could also say “five large,” but that came later.) Now “K” seems to have become the abbreviation of choice, perhaps because of the slow, grudging rise of the metric system and its kilo-thises and kilo-thats. You may like 5K runs, or maybe you’d prefer five kilos of cocaine, but either way, you wind up with “K.”

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