The Trends in Fads: What We Meme When We Say "New and Improved"


Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads
by Joel Best
University of California Press

Note: A slightly different version of this review appears today in the San Francisco Chronicle.

by William S. Kowinski

A fad, says the Oxford English Dictionary, is "a peculiar notion as to the right way of doing something." Its traditional reference has been to "a pet project, especially of social and political reform, to which an exaggerated importance is attributed."

Fads define themselves by being the absolute right answer, quickly replaced by the next one. The only way to lose weight is: cut calories, low carb, low fat (and carbon loading), high fiber, milkshakes, low carb again. Joel Best's book focuses on institutional fads, that suddenly dominate management meetings, training sessions, newsletters and retreats, before they wanly disappear and are replaced by the next bright promise. For instance, in business over the past decade or so, there's been: quality management, Excellence, Theory Z, paradigm shifts, fire-walking, business process re-engineering, the Fifth Discipline and Six Sigma, among others. Academics will be wearily familiar with: distance learning, service learning, online learning, zero-based budgeting, the demographic bulge, the demographic bust.

Best analyzes the lifecycle of institutional fads, how (in his terminology) they emerge, surge, diffuse and are purged. Fads are made possible by networks of fast-moving information and an either/or mentality that demands a single answer to perceived problems. Best writes that educators, alarmed that some children are slow to learn to read, have instituted a series of new regimens concentrating on one key method, such as phonics, which emphasizes sounding out words in parts, or "whole language" (also called "word recognition") that emphasizes words in context. Best points out that both methods are essential, and that favoring one over the other has not altered the fundamental fact that some children learn to read faster than others.

Not all fads represent pendulum swings, and beyond the talking points, Best engages in some deeper analysis of fad-making mechanisms. But casual readers will probably be most amused by the many anonymous commentaries Best reproduces, that appear on office bulletin boards and these days circulate by email, such as the American solution to losing a rowing match with Japan in which it had one person rowing and eight steering: after a consultant study and management reorganization, the American team added three steering directors and two steering supervisors. When that didn't work, they laid off the rower. This office folklore is frequently wittier and wiser than any signed analysis, with the possible exception of the Dilbert cartoon strip (which uses ideas suggested by readers.)

Why do we fall for fads? Why do fools fall in love? Novelty attracts our nervous systems, our faith is progress and our passion is hope. Something new might be the next great thing (the last one sure wasn't), no matter how bizarre it seems at first. They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round. They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.

Some fads begin with a really neat word. Best mentions chaos theory, which began in physics but quickly spread to areas like analyzing literature, where it was deployed with little understanding of its original meaning. A more recent example might be meme, which biologist Richard Dawkins proposed as the mental analogue of the gene. As dubious as Dawkins original claim might be, the word itself has spread like wildfire, but used essentially to mean an idea quickly replicated through the media. It is the latest fad for a word that means: the latest fad.

Although Best barely mentions it, elements of many institutional fads survive the surge and purge cycle to settle into the synthesis of how things are done. Mission statements, just-in-time supply lines, bench-marking and attention to corporate culture were all parts of 1980s management fads like Excellence and Quality. Now they're so normal that young managers might be surprised to learn they are newer than video stores.

That's because these flavors aren't ice cream-they're basically ideas, however initially inflated the claims. They enter the mix for experiment, evaluation and transformation, becoming part of how business, education and our lives are managed and mis-managed. It's also been known for years that one reason many good ideas become failed fads is that management tries to impose practices on the employees who must implement them without taking their practical modifications or point of view seriously. Instead, these dogmatic approaches become the hula hoops employees must jump through.

There's a lot more to be said about the subject, like why managers are so susceptible to magical thinking (I call it the Blue Angel Syndrome---what do you think, have I got a book there?) But this book is a clearly written and overdue overview and analysis of the subject. Besides, there may be just enough to make this book on fads into one: it offers a simple step-by-step explanation with catchy names (I see a Power Point accompaniment) that will entertain business and academic conventions for the usual year.

There is a problem, however. Flavor of the Month is a well-worn name for the phenomenon. A fad needs a brand-new catchy title, like The Tipping Point, Flow, The Peter Principle, Future Shock, Psychobabble (the title of a forgotten book by Richard Rosen) or even The Malling of America.

'>DEATH SENTENCES: How Cliches, Weasel Words, and Management-Speak Are Strangling Public Language
by Don Watson
'>Gotham Books, 208 pages, $20.

by William S. Kowinski

"Words can be like notes, like expressions of the soul," Don Watson writes. "They can make our hair stand up, they can lift our understanding to a higher plane, make us see things differently. They can inspire love and hope. You can see it happen before your eyes. Words can create a magic halo."

But before closure can be achieved on such product, robust parameters of total quality and competitive international best practices are key self-management and self-marketing requirements, in order to leverage vibrant pre-empowering emotional communication nodes and re-purpose functional deployment as a strategic initiative committed to an enhanced content provider environment. A personal mission statement sometimes helps.

Don Watson wrote speeches for the prime minister of Australia and corporation chief executives, and he wrote company brochures and manuals. The essence of these jobs (as I know from personal experience---except for the prime minister part) is translation. You have to translate their normal vocabulary and syntax into something a little closer to English. That's mostly so you can understand it. You may then be required to re-translate it back into the vocabulary and syntax that lies in their comfort zone, and that of their colleagues, while giving other people at least a hint of what it's all about.

It's a tough job and who can blame Watson for getting snarky about it. But for all the built-in satire (while Watson was writing for the prime minister, he was also writing for a comedian), this is not one of those decorously amusing Edwin Newman collections of bad grammar. Watson quotes Eric Alterman's phrase, "the post-truth environment" as a section title, because that's where we live now and where we must try to survive. Unfortunately, the truth environment surrounds it, and it contains everything necessary for our ultimate survival. If we lose touch with that, we're cooked. Sorry---I meant to say "opted out."

But don't despair: your call is important to us. That's why we've hired these nice Third World people to take it, if you insist on hitting zero while our rich-toned mechanism recites the Tibetan Menu of the Dead.

"Managerial language is an abuse of human rights," Watson writes, in a suspiciously short sentence. "It robs people of their senses, their culture, and their tongue."

I recall a New Yorker cartoon from years ago that I have been pondering ever since. A woman at a cocktail party cornered a corporate officer type to inquire, "If this is the Information Age, why doesn't anyone know anything?"

It's because most people are lying. They may only be lying in that they don't actually know what they are saying, but usually that's because they're selling something, and they're trying to find the magic words.

Watson writes about the new clichés (or are they memes?), the jargon and fashionable abstractions that do actually mean something sometimes, but often not what the people who use them intend. The two most important things in most people's working lives today are being accepted and getting noticed. It's a difficult and dangerous dance. Skillful deployment of cliché is key. Passive voice is such a help.

But of course it must be the right sort of cliché. With loyalties becoming more virtual and temporary, ideology identifies the feathers of the birds you want to flock together with. This of course goes way beyond politics. There are corporate ideologies, and ideologies specific to certain business sectors (used to be "trades" but no longer). "Ideologues speak in language best understood by ideologues of like minds," Watson notes. Elementary. It is language as ritual code. Most people understand this, and so books like this are for private chortles in the bathroom at home, assuming the cell phone is not in use, which is getting to be a big assumption.

"Parrots, when they are separated from their flocks, know by instinct they must quickly join another one or they will make a meal for hawks," Watson observes. He doesn't mean they will realign to a cooking mode. "It is from this understanding that their mimetic skill derives."

So we don't actually need some genetic basis for the sudden popularity of "death tax" or "re-framing" (as in meme theory), although this is kind of a sad biological explanation. In the meantime, in this era of full-time communication, our vocabularies are actually shrinking.
This bodes not well.

A small stroke of genius here is the glossary, which is devilishly revealing. It is largely made up of single buzzwords (like "event," "product," "issue") that are so broadly used that they are just about meaningless, except as they describe what marketing attitude you take towards them. Watson helpfully uses them in a sentence, emphasizing the classic and familiar: "To be or not to be---they are the scenarios," "I workshop, therefore I am," and my favorite, "There is more product in heaven and earth, Horatio/Than is dreamed of in your philosophy."

I would now like to initiate fundraising to coalesce a committee to implement a quality thank you to Gotham Books for bringing this book to America, despite the potential flexible outcomes, and to Don Watson who, at the end of the day, made lemons out of lemonade, for which we'd like to hire someone to express our bottom line, which is gratitude. You may now buy this book.


This seems an appropriate occasion to brag about my good fortune at the recycling center recently. In a pile of discarded books I found a worn but intact copy of English Synonyms and Antonyms by James C. Fernald, published in 1914. It is wonderful.

Much of the book is taken up by indexes and study questions, but the heart of it is a list of several hundred words, with not only their synonyms, but a marvelous paragraph about the proper shades of meaning. For example:

"Anxiety is, according to its derivation, a choking disquiet, akin to anguish; anxiety is mental; anguish may be mental or physical; anguish is in regard to the known, anxiety in regard to the unknown; anguish is because of what has happened, anxiety because of what may happen."

Anxiety is then contrasted with apprehension, fear, dread, forboding, terror, worry, solicitude, fretting, disquiet and perplexity.

I would now like to declare a war on forboding. It will involve bombing the axis of anxiety.

The entry for Physical states: "Whatever is composed of or pertains to matter may be termed material; physical (from Gr. physis, nature) applies to material things considered as parts of a system or organic whole."

That's useful, but frankly I consume these paragraphs like a glutton recently discharged from South Beach. It's a sad prospect but it's unlikely I will ever get to choose between using pique ("denotes a sudden feeling of mingled pain and anger, but slight and usually transient") and umbrage ("a deeper and more persistent displeasure"), but now I know, and I even know why (because pique signifies a sting, as of a nettle, while umbrage, from L.umbra, a shadow, is displeasure at being overshadowed.) And there is the guilty pleasure of these sentences: "It may be said, as a general statement, that pique arises from wounded vanity, umbrage from wounded pride or sometimes suspicion. Resentment rests on more solid grounds, and is deep and persistent. Compare ANGER."

But of course it's all obsolete now---why the entry for "support" says nothing at all about "supportive of." I first heard this loathsome locution in the 70s, when it came directly from T-groups and sensitivity training. It actually meant something specific then, distinguishing a kind of psychological support from a physical (or material) one. I even recall joking that if it caught on, people would go around saying they were supportive of a particular candidate for president, or paying "child supportive of." I don't think the second has happened yet, but we are long past the first. And frankly, I am more than piqued. I am impacted. I take umbrage.

Watching Your Language #1
Much Ado About Few

by William Severini Kowinski


Fewer things may seem less important than a small alteration in language, but there may be something more to this one. For in common speech and in print, there are fewer and fewer instances of "few", and more and more of "less."

In particular, it's become common to hear the expression "less people" rather than "fewer people." Is this simply a case of English getting more efficient? Or does it suggest something more troubling?

The distinction between "few" and "less" which has been standard English since at least the 18th century, is simply stated: "few" applies to number, "less" to quantity. While there are the usual ambiguous circumstances, the usage has been clear in the most common instances: "few" or "fewer" people, for example. But these days, "less" is increasingly used.

It is not just an American phenomenon. A quick Internet search yielded examples from most English speaking countries, including articles from the Economist ("less people, more water") and AllAfrica.com. ("Less People Buy Bibles as Condom Sales Soar.") "The use of 'less people' etc. is so common in British English that there seems little point in claiming it as an error," wrote a teacher in Great Britain to her listserv. Another agreed that "fewer" is archaic. "...Less means the same as fewer," wrote someone in a different discussion on the subject. " So what is wrong with plain English, simpler English? Want to write a Victorian novel? Use fewer."

Though those of us who cling to "fewer" are fewer, I don't think we are we less democratic. The resources of a rich language can be used to deploy distinctions, which is crucial to meaningful debate in a democratic society. Communication among the many does not have to mean less precision: it very likely depends on more.

There may even be a more direct attack on certain values of our society reflected in this elimination. Perhaps we need to ask what has changed in the phrase "less people." Is it the grammar of "fewer" and "less," or is it our underlying idea of people?

In changing how we express the outcome of a count, are we changing our conception of what we are measuring? Do we see people only in aggregates, and not in affiliations? Do we now consider people not as integers with integrity, but as quantities that are classified according to common characteristics?

Perhaps in our marketing-minded society, numbers of people translate too easily into quantities of money, or of votes. If votes are just quantities, then stealing them is just theft. But if votes are individual commitments added up, to cheat is to dishonor the people who stood in line at the polls for hours in the rain. "Count the votes" means the voters must count more than the outcome.

The cause of human rights is based on the individual as significant, not as an indistinguishable element in a quantity that doesn't count. When justice or health depend more on quantities of money and power, individuals count less.

Quantity applies to objects, implying a passivity, of being acted upon. Number and counting suggest subject, capable of action: "Stand and be counted." Few can become many. When quantities of money have overpowering political effects, only numbers of people can balance it.

Or perhaps it takes only a few. The sense of individual significance is often conveyed in the most famous instances of "few": "Many are called, but few are chosen." "We happy few, we band of brothers," "A few good men." It's the key to the joke in the early 1960s British comedy "Beyond the Fringe", in an exchange between an officer and a soldier, mocking a World War II movie heroism cliché: "Sir, I want to be one of the few." "Sorry, there are far too many."

Yet we're talking more about "less people," as science suggests the individual, and the individual action, is potentially more powerful than previously believed. The now-famous "butterfly effect" of chaos theory is but one example: it can take even less than a few butterflies to change the weather thousands of miles away.

"Fewer" has a dignity lacking in "less." The change in language may be a done deal, but "less people" doesn't necessarily mean fewer butterflies.