What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
Just like music*, I hate words.
There are some in particular that make my blood boil. The reaction to my reaction to certain words is often on a continuum of 'That's a bit weird to 'Okay okay calm down jfc.' If you don't believe me 👇
Would you like to know some of these words? Would you like to find out why? No? Tough, here we go.
Values
Ooh. Let me associate my GUIDING PRINCIPLES with something that sounds eerily like an economy of suggested worth. It feels to me whenever values are mentioned, there's a demanding substructure that these guiding principles have to yield some form of nobility or worthiness. I believe this can lead to people eschewing principles they feel deep down and rather opting for those they believe they should strive to have. This in turn leads to an internal tension and external boring assed normie crowd following homogenisation.
Accountability
Behold another term that's somehow drilled it's way into our vocabulary. Again, it lives in a domain of economics and often carries with it a sense of debt and worth. Not doing something (debt) is BAD. Doing something (credit) is GOOD. I have mentioned 'shame debt' elsewhere. This is that. Do you see the problem here? Being in debt makes you a bad person? Being held to account lest you fall into (shameful) debt? Am I the only one who sees this as a horrific cascade into binary / hierarchical thinking? Feels like the British empire are planting a fucking flag in my brain any time I hear that stupid word.
Resilience
Let's completely misunderstand how ADAPTIVE CAPACITY works by focusing on the breaking point. The bookend where our ability to adapt collapses. That's resilience. Another common-as-muck word thrown around in just about every sphere possible, always pulling focus from what's actually important. If people were to better understand capacity and especially adaptive capacity, I think this word would drift out of use. Why? I think we'd shift to better understanding smaller inputs, subtle influence, manageable progression in place of catastrophic failure. Maybe it would help prevent the pendulum swing from zero to hunner we see when someone gets back on their proverbial horse at full throttle, lathered in extrinsic beans. I often wonder if our [maybe not your, but defo the strength and conditioning / health / popsci space] seeming obsession with resilience is due to inherent human negativity bias -or- if our focus on resilience (how much of x until we break) actually creates our negativity bias. I will admit, Pronk(s) et al's work on The Resilience Shield is incredibly well presented and positive - but they had to redefine the word for their purposes.
I think that's enough for now. If you want to know any other words I hate, let me know. Even better: what words do you hate?
/EOF
Lore for Today
*I am only sort of kidding about the music thing above. Almost all normal music makes me furious. I will listen to some wordless brooding soundscape or Meshuggah clattering out an almost unmappable polyrhythmic headache, video game or movie soundtrack and feel a deep sense of peace or joy. If someone puts on dance, pop, country or a plethora of other normal person stuff I will be climbing the fucking walls in seconds. Go fig.