I Was Present at the Creation of "Impactful"

I knew it would not end well.



It was, as I recall, a senior manager at the Very Large Insurance Company for which I was hacking code in the 1980s.

He was an up-and-comer, very aggressive and barely literate outside of the mandatory 500-word corporate buzzspeak vocabulary. He could not wrap his head around the difference between "affect" and "effect" and so gave up altogether and went with "impact, "impactful", "impactfulness".


h/t to reader "Liam" for the reminder that none of our contemporary concerns about the debased, denuded, deflective language with which we are daily strafed are especially new:

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.
...

Continued here.

One of the Very Best Movies about Writing

That you might never have seen.

So many good moments.

One of my favorites:

Vernon Hardapple: Why did you keep writing this book if you didn't even know what it was about?

Grady Tripp: I couldn't stop.

Truth.

"Give me a child...

...and I'll shape him into anything."

-- B. F. Skinner

Apparently Our Mr. Brooks could have saved himself just oodles of time (from Will Wilkinson's scalding review)...

The Social Animal by David Brooks: A Scornful Review

...
“This is the happiest story you’ve ever read,” Brooks begins. It isn’t. It is depressing. “It is about two people who lead wonderfully fulfilling lives.” Actually, it is about two boring people who lead muted, more or less satisfactory lives in the successful pursuit of achievement as it is narrowly defined by their culture. That such emotionally straitened, humorlessly striving characters are cast as romantic leads in the science-certified “happiest story” of all is baffling and sad. More baffling still is that Brooks’ intends this chilling portrait to offer consolation, to persuade us there is much to gain, and little to fear, in losing our unscientific illusions about human nature.

Something in The Social Animal is badly awry.

We follow Harold from the first twinkle in his parents’ eyes, through his marriage to Erica, to the mawkishly-rendered moment of his death. We pick up Erica’s story at childhood and drop it when Harold expires. Harold and Erica go to good schools, and pass through a series of haute bourgeois jobs—museum curator, freelance consultant, corporate marketing functionary, author of mid-list historical biographies—until, finally, the hyper-achieving Erica arrives as the chief executive of a cable company, and the ponderous Harold scores a sinecure at a neocon think tank, where he pastes David Brooks opinion columns into papers on public policy.
...

by just basting together his many, meandering columns nibbling at the edges of the science and pseudoscience of others. wrapping a big, shiny Centrist bow around it and calling the whole wobbly mess "Walden Three: Ken and Barbie Decorate Their Davos Dream House" (from Wiki):

Walden Two is a science fiction novel written by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner and first published in 1948.

In the novel, the author describes an experimental community named Walden Two. The community is located in a rural[ area and "has nearly a thousand members." The members are portrayed as happy, productive, and creative. The community encourages its members "to view every habit and custom with an eye to possible improvement" and to have "a constantly experimental attitude toward everything".

When the members find a problem in their community they may design and experimentally test a possible solution, carefully documenting the results of their experiment in accordance with the scientific method. If the results of their testing indicates that the proposed solution would be an improvement over their current cultural practices then they may make that experimentally validated improvement into a component of their community's culture. This cultural optimization process is called "cultural engineering."
...

Excelsior, bitches!

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