What is it but a dream?

In the spirit of the acronym, today's peom shall be an acrostic: acros coming from Greek and meaning “end or outermost.” It's from Through the Looking Glass (1871) and is built on the full name of the real-life Alice: Alice Pleasance Liddell. You'll notice the similarity to a well-known nursery rhyme, which I discovered predates the poem by at least a couple of decades. The first printing of “Row, row, row your boat” was in 1852, so no doubt it was being sung by Victorian children for some years prior. What better, on a wintery Friday, to drift into the dreamy world of Lewis Carroll?

A boat, beneath a sunny sky
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July -

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear -

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream -
Lingering in the golden gleam -
Life, what is it but a dream?

OMG! AATOTW!

I wouldn't presume to out-Watson Don Watson by saying any more about management language than he has already so ably said, but here's a word or two about acronyms. Now, technically, an acronym is a word made from initial letters (UNESCO, Radar, Qantas etc) not just a bunch of initials, but since there's no really satisfyingly technical word for a bunch of letters, and bunches of letters seem to be colonising the language at an alarming rate, I'll use 'acronym' here to refer to the wide substitutionary use of bunched capital letters in place of words. I think there are two main reasons people use acronyms. Firstly, they use them to save time. But whose time? By compressing the words, the speaker or writer saves time by transferring the burden of cognitive interpretation onto the hearer or reader. Like deciphering 'txt' language (which I find brain-curdling), unpacking acronyms is an added layer of process for the recipient of communication, which she usually has to do rapidly and imperceptibly, and without compromising her reception of the message as a whole. The user of acronyms is essentially saying: 'my time is more valuable than yours.' The second reason is related to the first. People use acronyms to demonstrate their gnostic initiation into a particular tribe, their insider status. Their time is more valuable precisely because they have been initiated, because they are on first-letter terms with all the important phrases.

Having said that, I regularly encounter acronyms that, when expanded, don't make much more sense than a random bunch of letters; indeed many of their component words could be reversed, replaced or interchanged without violence to the sense - such as it is.

Newspeak

Sorry for neglecting my poetic duties yesterday, but I have an excuse. I spent part of this week at a thing in Sydney, learning about corporate communication. Coming mostly from university and public sector experience,  I felt a bit like a yokel with all those slick, stylish corporate types from companies like Coke, Google, Qantas, Microsoft, and Cadbury (probably the first time I've been in a room with that many people who didn't assume that big business was somehow anti-social). I was somewhat startled by how completely unapologetic the editor of Women's Weekly was, and by a former director of all kinds of corporate outfits who seemed to be whingeing that ordinary people's expectations of boards and directors were far too high, and that governments had been unfairly pinning the GFC on banks and business when it wasn't really their fault. (In silhouette, he bore a striking resemblance to one C. Montgomery Burns.) Both made me think of that New Yorker cartoon where one member tells the rest of the board: “The figures for the last quarter are in. We made significant gains in the 15 to 26-year old age group, but we lost our immortal souls.”

However, I heard some interesting and encouraging things as well. A strong theme was that the days of spin and cover-up are long gone: honesty (or at least truthiness) is best; humility and courtesy will stand you in good stead. Another theme was the rise of technology and social media, and the unanimous view was that these will never replace face to face human interaction, and the data they yield will always require human interpretation. Assuming of course that communication retains its properties of subtlety, nuance, sentiment, sarcasm, and flourish - under the influence of social media, it may not. I also observed a tension in corporate communication between self-expression and self-protection. This, to me, explained why most corporate communication is so cripplingly dull.

I think what's wrong with corporatespeak is that it gets sucked dry of anything that might implicate those who generate it, or offend those who receive it. It ends up being hollow, tasteless, infinitely transferable. It's the dead opposite of what Duns Scotus called “thisness,” or what his admirer Hopkins called “inscape,” exemplified best in his poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” Here it is, to make up for yesterday, and to banish from my palate the nothingness of corporate comms.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

More on judgment

This evening, I got talking to a 4-year-old I know. He told me about his pre-school, and his teachers. Then he told me that the Queen would be visiting his school very soon, and that she would kill all the naughty boys. I'm not sure whether this idea was the product of his own fervent imagination, or that of a mischievous schoolfellow, or of an ingenious teacher, but he seemed quite in earnest, and quite anxious about the royal visit. To me, another testament that judgment day, at least imaginatively, is not far from every one of us.

Die another day

Well, another apocalyptic prediction goes unfulfilled, though Harold Camping has cleverly countered his critics by proposing a new date: 21 October. That oughta hold ’em. It’s oh so easy to mock such fatuous certainty (especially after the non-event), but I wonder if instances like this one, not uncommon in themselves, are simply extreme manifestations of something more broadly present, and not altogether unfounded. After all, the end of the world is neither provable nor disprovable by observation: the only assurance we have that the world won’t end tomorrow is that it never has before. The absurdity of doomdsay predictions lies, I think, in the confidence of a fixed date and time, not the concept of the world’s end. The idea in Genesis that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth is not in itself absurd, but Bishop Ussher’s idea, that God created the heavens and the earth on 23 October, 4004 BC, is. Doomsday is not confined to the religious (remember Y2K?). Sometimes it borders on hysteria, but it has more to do with moral sensitivity than with emotional or rational responses to data. Almost any worldview with a moral imperative has an implied apocalypse; the end of the world as a natural consequence, if not a divine judgment, of human error. Climate change is the obvious modern example, but every age has its judgment day as the climactic settlement of its peculiar debts. At one level, there is something healthy about a sense that our lives are contigent, temporary, lived at the mercy of events beyond our control – and that our debts will have to be paid.