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Beyond Gamification. Designing up Maslow’s Pyramid.

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Paul Keith:
umm... just out of curiosity, why the buttons?

but it seems that you have not yet been able to provide sufficiently coherent definition or fact to be able to establish whether the term "curation" and its derivatives are anything more than undefined hyped-up BS buzzwords that an implied 97% of scientists bloggers believe to be true.(A logical fallacy - an appeal to the consensus.)
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At some point, proof I think is left towards progress.

I think I've exhausted so many words and details, details that were ignored in favor of a simple sentence or a cursory overlapping glance, that it's kind of like trying to tell a person that the internet CAN exist even if it hasn't existed.

For me the proof is in the pudding though that, at least for this topic, you're not asking to be convinced while at the same time assuming I was trying to convince you rather than have a dialogue and hence adopting a stance where you act as if I was trying to simply convince you. It's really disappointing but I just can't ignore it when you start throwing things like The Emperor still has no clothes as if I was a messenger of the Emperor. As if I somehow want to convince everyone that everyone should just accept and buy into the hype of buzz words even though your reply says:

Curation: ...rather than buzzwords

The earlier dialogue was certainly enlightening and I have no regrets conversing with you but these last few posts just come off as if you're talking down to me. Old manner of replying that went into details become less and less so. Cursory judgements become more and more justified as valid replies. Points become less and less discussed in favor of points such as "you still have not convinced me" shaded in paragraphs. It would seem that your interest (not your patience) have ran it's due of course and you are simply replying for the sake of replying.

I have already had one person in the DCF comment that I am "...the man who writes the longest and most convoluted posts in the entire forum". I think this was from the same person as used a logical fallacy without realising it and, when I mentioned it, seemed to think it was a matter of opinion as to whether it was a fallacy.(!)
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No, no. This title clearly belongs to me. You have one, I have several both in real life and in the internet. You often provide links. I often provide mere opinions and observations. Only providing links when I encounter them to supplement my opinion.

I apologize though if I don't see the relevance of this and your statement about Scoop.it. You already admitted that you gave a cursory review.

I only have one other thing to add: By gods man be more vicious! My posts rail on you for being a bit harsh not because you are a bit harsh but because it doesn't  seem like that of someone who is harsh at all on curation. Your last few posts reads that of someone who is a bit harsh on thin air, not on curation. That's the point. Be more harsh man! More links. Getting impatient? Throw all yer links and opinions at me. Don't hold back. I don't care what you or someone else thinks. I will read and respond to your posts to the best of my capabilities and if I can't, I will still read it. I don't guarantee it but so far I have read all your posts in this thread and I don't see why any evidence of why I won't stop doing so if it is worthwhile. Not this junk that adds an extra overhead of needing a click of a mouse to reveal and reveal only fluffy apologies. If you want to apologize, apologize for not being harsh at all, not for the opposite. I am not the other person you were talking to.

- which is an implicit appeal to the consensus.
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If it were consensus, it wouldn't be lacking in evidence. In the context of what I wrote and in the context of the person I was writing to (whom keeps insisting that it doesn't exist), it's more appeal to potential utility. A description far away leading to a road opposite of consensus.

Maybe the earth is still flat, and maybe Hitler was grossly misunderstood, and maybe eugenics/Communism/Fascism/[insert religio-political ideology or pseudoscience here] is the way ahead, and maybe there is anthropogenic global warming, and maybe there are fairies at the bottom of the garden, but I remain incredulous regarding these things until they are able to be substantiated as unequivocally true.
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Which is why I wrote:

Anyway, as far as usefulness in practice, that's up to debate but it seems enough people find use in the idea and I leave those people to silence or prove right the critics.

It's not so hard to understand a sentence if you don't try to snip it mid-way.

The article provides no definition for:
Financial Literacy
behavioral education
Behavioral Finance
Personal finance
- and yet these terms are used and bandied around in the article as though they actually mean something.
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It's a consequence of any new/more modern branch. Psychology is more guilty of this than anything else.

Your comment comes off as a red herring though as I believe this entire topic was meant for interesting reading and the link written in the context of my words was to show that some people seem to find potential innovative use in the concept you insist as purely being a buzz word with no apparent validity for existing. Your comment is certainly valid, it just replies to a different issue. Proof is there when you cling towards belief, ignoring that the author was sharing an anecdote of an answer he presumably gave in an interview.

As you so said:

There's nothing wrong with the article that couldn't be fixed by a complete rewrite.
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...but then why make it an issue of whether the author should rewrite it or not?

Your bolded text says:

Gamification: ...and not "Why the Author should rewrite the article"

Of course, there is no "new wave of folks who are exploring the gamification of personal finance". I have been involved in creating such games for students to play (on a mainframe computer) as learning games since the early '70s. Things have moved on a bit since then - e.g., I can practice placing buys and sells on the stock market through an online game system run by my New Zealand bank, which is similar to a game sponsored by the Wider Share Ownership Council in the UK in the mid-'70s.
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Which is part of the problem with your definition. Though it is not grammatically wrong.

Your supplied definition applies to game development. Gamification is not about creating games for the sake of creating games. (Even educational ones at that.)

Despite all this, it tends to be the case that the operation of accounting systems - and especially banking/insurance systems and processes - are a closed book to the majority of the population (who have not studied the theory of accounting and national payments transaction processing). I have a very cynical view that this state of affairs is maintained by the banks and insurance companies because they can only really maximise their profits by maintaining an impenetrable transparency of their operations. The last thing they want is a theoretically perfect Keynesian market where all consumers know what products and services are on offer at what prices, and from which financial institutions. That means that it is very difficult for the typical consumer to know/understand what the heck is going on with their money in the financial market.
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The above is the only notable element of your post. Yet it is a subject of banking, not gamification. You also did not elaborate upon it.

With the way you recently replied, I hold little hope that you can restore your old quality of replying (at least within the boundaries of this thread)

Thus I leave those topics you deem not worthy of addressing and I instead move on to topics you feel are worth your time.

Please criticize these links as if they were talking about gamification. They are old topics and you probably have addressed/viewed them elsewhere before and they barely hint to any gamification but at least there's more chance that you would pay them closer and better attention (which in turn would restore the quality of your replies) and we'd all go back to having something worthwhile to read (and reply to).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics

http://fora.tv/2010/06/07/Dan_Ariely_The_Upside_of_Irrationality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PzJopCWwQ4&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbfIWn_Rt1k&feature=related

Paul Keith:
Just to lighten up the mood (plus it's a topic that I would have created a thread for anyway)

http://gigaom.com/cleantech/poop-rewards-cell-phone-minutes-for-sanitation/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+jkOnTheRun+%28GigaOM%3A+Mobile%29

There are far more cell phones in India than there is access to sanitary toilets — about 600 million out of 1.2 billion Indians have ready access to a clean bathroom, while 800 million Indians have cell phones. That rather shocking stat, was an a-ha moment for Swapnil Chaturvedi, an entrepreneur who has been working on sanitation projects in India’s slums and who was looking for an idea to help him reach many more millions of Indians with clean toilets.

Chaturvedi’s idea is the awesomely-named Poop Rewards, a startup that creates an incentive program using cell phone talk minutes and other prizes to convince Indians that don’t have easy access to toilets to use designated public toilets in their area. These cell phone users are extremely price sensitive, explained Chaturvedi to me in an interview after winning first prize at the business competition Startup Weekend Delhi, and he thinks this demographic will be willing to change their behavior (or use a public toilet) to save a little bit of money or earn free cell phone talk time.
How it works

With a phone company as a partner, more public toilets could be built in the necessary areas — the U.N. estimates it only costs $300 for a low-cost toilet — and cell phone companies can use the rewards program to retain low-price conscious customers and provide a public service, which can also help with loyalty.

The Indian cell phone market is becoming increasingly commoditized and Indian cell phone companies are struggling to find ways to end churn (customers hopping to the next cheaper cell phone carrier offering a deal). Chaturvedi says carriers like Airtel spend a significant amount of money just trying to keep its customers from leaving for a competitor. In the same way that the airline industry was saved by rewards programs that gave free miles to loyal users, cell phone companies can create rewards programs around sanitation that can also give back to the community, says Chaturvedi.

Down the road, Chaturvedi envisions the program could be an open source tool that local entrepreneurs in developing areas can use to create their own Poop Rewards programs with carriers. But Chaturvedi is still just figuring out his business model, he tells me.

Development of an idea

Like all good entrepreneurs, Chaturvedi has pivoted a bit on his original ideas. He had been working on a type of toilet that could convert human waste into electricity, and he’d received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to work on that. But after going over the math, he kept realizing he was only going to be able to reach a very small population relative to the problem because the project required funding and lacked incentives. His new idea, Poop Rewards, could potentially work with the waste-to-fuel toilet, but it is more focused overall on just boosting a sanitation network.

Chaturvedi hopes to start a pilot project with a test toilet and user group in the coming months (Airtel is really interested, he says). Make way for the Poop franchise. Though, yes, there are a bunch of hurdles ahead, like convincing a carrier for a deal, and launching a program that does actually produce a behavior change.

Along the way no doubt he’ll need some funding, and most of the startups at Startup Weekend Delhi were looking for funds. At the end of Chaturvedi’s pitch, angel investor Dave McClure (see disclosure below) told Chaturvedi that his pitch was the best of the day and that he is interested in potentially funding the project.
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That said a rewards program isn't really new but the premise about it being more about gaming human behaviour fits enough with the theme of this thread I guess.

Paul Keith:
Ok, I just recently thought of another angle to explain the notability of gamification which is by comparing it to game theory.

I don't really understand game theory since I'm neither knowledgeable about stats, math nor of game programming. I also find the explanations for game theory very obscure. Often dealing with information you know versus information you don't know.

In fact, I still don't know if it's a buzz word that people just picked up or it's a revolutionary concept in the sense that from an ignorant perspective, game theory comes off like statisticians simply looking for games to make their explanations seem more endearing both to their inherent desire to play games and to the general public. Nonetheless enough people talk about game theory that it's hard to dismiss it as just sugar coating especially on the side of analytics.

The idea that inspired this post was of a Baldur's Gate mod called Learning through use.

BG for those who don't know is a PC game that looks like Diablo but plays "kinda sorta" like a Dungeons and Dragon based tabletop game except it's not really tabletop roleplaying but an action rpg layered over the tabletop's rules.

This post assumes you see the logic in why Learn through use, by trying to step aside the rules of the official game, makes it a richer experience than the vanilla game.

Here's the Learn through Use description:

Proficiency points are gained for weapon types that are actually used, and they are gained at set boundaries, independent of the level up process - if you've used a weapon for so long you're going to get better, even if you've not killed a few thousand creatures or solved a few quests.
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Now if you change the concept from proficiency points to say...education for everyone in real life...essentially what it means is that this mod allows the pursuit of an approach where people, regardless of race/property/prosperity of location born, can have an opportunity to learn items they wield. This can be anything from programming educational games to having high quality manuals as companions for new technologies or even simply bringing a more practical approach to the classroom.

...but let's say this mod doesn't exist. There's still a "learning environment". It's just different. It's just limited. Not necessarily in a bad way but it's limited. Limited and widely accepted.

How would you determine whether there's a problem that urgently needs tweaking?

...then how would you come to the conclusion that the solution...or at least the logic is to make everyone learn through using rather than learn through being via being rich or being given scholarship or being a student with high grades or being an athlete, etc. etc. etc. How?

After that, how will you convince people to switch to this?

Do a reverse analogy. How many people would really play Baldur's Gate and love the game without even installing or finding urgent value in this particular mod?

I'm not claiming game theory is the only way to come to the conclusion but by looking at it through the lens of a "game" - a concept with a clearer analogy of what a winner or loser is in a series of vacuum environments, you'd get to a point that pokes at the problem in a much clearer message because then you can impart a message of what's wrong with the logic of the current game rules. Will it change the world dramatically? Most likely not. Best case scenario is that it convinces a bunch of rule makers and people with modern king's rights like those who own corporations to use the empathy gained from the message's story to make themselves more profitable and in turn more powerful. In a DnD concept, game theory would be like hiring a lawyer to argue with the game master of why the game master's rules are a lose/lose situation and why they should change it. Sometimes it changes for the better. Most times it would change for the one with the lawyer. Other times it would get you kicked out after that particular game is over. Etc. etc. etc.

From a notability side, at least enough people are poking at the rules, because they perceive it as a game or a "tournament of life".

At least though doesn't solve anything. Much as even the most unique educational games are often not really about the game programmers being hired to perfect the education aspect but to simply create a game within the circle of game programming and after it's been developed, the symbol of the game is mostly irrelevant and is left up to the packagers, marketers, distributors on how they would approach selling forth and bringing forth the conscious identity of a game, many real life concepts follow the same pattern. One can calculate and simulate the likelihood of a revolution but it doesn't mean the formula leads to anything but more attempts at revolution as people fail to take into account the impact of post-revolution progress and so on and so forth. People can, after these disasters, try to explain away why so and so did work and didn't work but from a software perspective, it's all patch fixing. We already know from software's history though that society doesn't really apply the best methods. Linux being more secure but less popular than Windows for example until Android but then Android convinces smarter users to root their Android making it less safe despite root being so serious an issue in the Linux world that people criticize one of the best distroes for newbies in Puppy for making the setting this way by default even though Puppy would still be more secure than Windows XP.

So how would you go about solving a game in which the programmers are decentralized? Some being on top. Some being activists. Some being common lay people. You have to make it moddable and moddable not only in design but by intent. Gamification has that potential. It makes designers not only think of people as pawns but as part of the whole chess board. In turn, it leads back to the more original and well intentioned pursuit of marketing. Rather than demographics, more people could view other people in stereotypical roles. Rather than stereotypical roles, more people could pursue making such roles more fruitful in order to utilize other people as opposed to doing the reverse and seeing profits by defining other people's roles for them. The cascading effect rolls on and on. Instead of seeing people for what they are, gamification aims to see people's actions for what they say they are. Instead of seeing people's actions for what they say they are, gamification aims to see people's actions for what they really are regardless of rationality.

Of course like any buzz words, there's a high prone of being misused or even underused as is the case of mass demand and little understanding of supply. That's actually a good thing though as instead of the corrupt rule designers and rule makers getting the potential too quickly before the well intentioned people do, these more evil intentioned people are busy hacking at it through making trinkets such as Zynga copycat games and other such items such as videogames in turn making gamification more notable as a concept and less notable as a buzz word which in turn advertises the potential of gamification to more well intentioned people. The result no more being different than a popular game having more modders than a less popular game. Are all those mods great and bug free? Hell no but now we're back to a new Dark Age that aims towards a Renaissance or Enlightenment type of society rather than a world of consumers and conquerors.

That's only IF gamification or a concept like gamification totally takes off though. It is my opinion that both the vagueness and notability of gamification is linked towards the vagueness and notability of modern videogame design. We're no longer in an age of Pac-man where fun = great videogame. People inside the industry are probably if not definitely aware of this as far as game development but as an analogy towards a grander analogy which is how certain media defines how people pursue progress, I believe few people notice the change of mindset videogames have brought forth upon the roles of people. The flaws of Marxism for example that were once there slightly evaporates when one thinks of how one game can be interacted differently each time despite it being one singular mass produced containment item. The definition of the Invisible Hand which were once passive gains a new active definition when one considers the difference between how games and gamers self-regulate versus how society in general self-regulate. The exclusivity of item within a certain OS slightly evaporates much as the cloud has helped urged people to be more cross-platform conscious despite long term stability and security being dissolved. If you can see the similarities between how the different types of Operating System are akin to symbols of different countries where the solutions of one country have often failed to reach another country because of Operating System culture, then you can see how the flood gates can be redefined under gamification. What was once just Risk as perceived by the masses could become <insert any modern strategy game>. Instead of countries dissolving the Gold Standard because America did or instead of people adopting poorer copies of public education because America had them or instead of people having colony mindset, they had copycat game mindset due to gamification...alot of the current structures and theories of our planet will change just from the adoption of gamification. That's something even the best of the rest of the buzz words do not have as much potential to do so even if they defy all odds. The idea of games gives new definition to physics. The idea of games gives new definition to philosophy. The idea of games gives new definition to progress. The idea though never took off despite the analogy of life as a game being so old because people simply used and pursued it as a way to hack life. Gamification is like this long term post-conscious mindset after a game has been hacked for so long that after society became so immersed in all the evidence of people cheating the system and all the people becoming apathetic within it, one ends up seeing people develop this panorama where people are slaves to the most mundane of items and how these addictive adopted society is so wrong that one repursues new definition to progress and as people one by one create their new definition in this manner, one ends up developing a singular new mindset where the planet is just a classic console with quality gems hidden in it rather than this competitive modern console that has to have every new way of deploring progress that are just Emperor's New Clothes in disguise and in turn, this long term effect which in the short term brought little notability if not more addiction to vanity ends up creating a noble simple concept like the Learn through Use mod where in a low ranking rule changer can simply develop one unique rule that makes sense via simply going back to his/her biological roots of being a human living in a human society.

IainB:
@Paul Keith: This is written in the hope that it may be of use in improving the clarity of this discussion.
I apologise for not replying before now, but, taking a pedantic approach, I was rather nonplussed by the above posts of yours as they seemed to be trying to make logical points/arguments all over the place, but without having a clearly perceivable (by me) logical structure or apparent solid basis for substantiation. I wondered if the posts showed evidence that either:
(a) you may be having a joke with me by using a nifty little text-generating program;
or
(b) you may have succumbed to intellectual laziness.

I could be wrong in this, of course, but I shall assume (b) to be more probable. I don't mean to be rude, as I recognise it (intellectual laziness) as something that I suffer from - from time to time. (I think we all do, on occasion.)

A lot of intellectual laziness can be equated to basic (first-principles) uncritical thinking, and can be attributed to the insufficient use of language and semantics to unambiguously convey clarity of meaning, thought and logical argument.

I was reminded of this when I reread this interesting item in my Scrapbook library. It's a post from the Harvard Business Review of 2008 (tagged under Communism, Thinking, Philosophy, Bullshit, Buzzword):
Why Jargon Feeds on Lazy Minds
Spoilerhttp://discussionleader.hbsp.com/berkun/2008/08/why-jargon-feeds-on-lazy-minds.html

Why Jargon Feeds on Lazy Minds
Posted by Scott Berkun on August 7, 2008 11:40 AM

If I could give every single business writer, guru or executive one thing to read every morning before work, it'd be this essay by George Orwell: Politics and the English Language.

Not only is this essay short, brilliant, thought-provoking and memorable, it calls bullshit on most of what passes today as speech and written language in management circles. And if you are too lazy to read the article, all you need to remember is this: never use a fancy word when a simple one will do. If your idea is good, no hype is necessary. Explain it clearly and people will get it, if there truly is something notable to get. If your idea is bad: keep working before you share it with others. And if you don't have time for that, you might as well be honest. Because when you throw jargon around, most of us know you're probably lying about something anyway.

In honor of George, whose birthday was last month, here is a handy list of words I hear often in management circles that should be banned. Flat out, these words are never used for good reason.

Words that should be banned:

    Breakthrough
    Transformative
    Next-generation
    Seamless
    Game-changing
    Ideation (oh how I hate this word)
    Disruptive
    Incentivize
    Innovation Infrastructure
    Customer-centric
    Radical

These are the lazy words of 2008, and whenever i see them used I feel justified in challenging the claims. To use these words with a straight face is to assume the listener is an idiot. They are intellectual insults. They are shortcuts away from good marketing and strong thinking since they try to sneak by with claims they know they cannot prove or do not make any sense.

Marketers and managers use jargon because it's safe. No one stops them to ask: exactly what is it you are breaking through? What precisely are you transforming, and how are you certain the new thing will be better than the old (e.g. New Coke)? If no one, especially no one in power, challenges its use, jargon spreads, choking the life out of conversations and meetings forever.

Pay attention to who uses the most jargon: it's never the brightest. It's those who want to be perceived as the best and the brightest, something they know they are not. They use cheap language tricks to intimidate, distract, and confuse, hoping to sneak past those afraid to ask what they really mean.

I'm going to do my best for the rest of the year to question people who use these lazy, deceptive, and inflated terms. Maybe then they'll use their real marketing talents and tell me a story so powerful that I believe, all on my own, will transform this, or revolutionize that.

What jargon do you hear these days that you'd like to add to the list above? Let me know.
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It refers to George Orwell's essay:
Politics And The English Language
SpoilerPolitics And The English Language
by George Orwell
Published in Horizon, April 1946; Modern British Writing ed. Denys Val Baker, 1947.

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 arguments 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 influences 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 towards 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.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad  I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative samples. I number them so I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression).

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate or put at a loss for bewilder.Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa).

3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity? Essay on psychology in Politics (New York).

4. All the 'best people' from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic Fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror of the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction to proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervour on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis. Communist pamphlet.

5 . If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream  as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes, or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as 'standard English'. When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school ma'amish arch braying of blameless, bashful mewing maidens! Letter in Tribune.

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery: the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically 'dead' (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, rift within the lute, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a 'rift', for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would be aware of this, and would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subject to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc.etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining) . The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved from anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

Pretentious diction.. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilise, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien r?gime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, Gleichschaltung, Weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, sub-aqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers. The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc) consists largely of words and phrases translated from Russian, German or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words.. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, 'The outstanding features of Mr X's work is its living quality', while another writes, 'The immediately striking thing about Mr X's work is its peculiar deadness', the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable'. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

    I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

    Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit 3, above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations  race, battle, bread  dissolve into the vague phrase 'success or failure in competitive activities'. This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing  no one capable of using phrases like 'objective consideration of contemporary phenomena'  would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyse these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains 49 words but only 60 syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains 38 words of 90 syllables: 18 of its words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase ('time and chance') that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier  even quicker, once you have the habit  to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry  when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech  it is natural to fall into a pretentious, latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash  as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting-pot  it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski uses five negatives in 53 words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip alien for akin, making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means, (3) if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4) the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea-leaves blocking a sink. In (5) words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning  they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you  even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent  and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connexion between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions, and not a 'party line'. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases  bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder  one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, 'I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so'. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

    While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find  this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify  that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he 'felt impelled' to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence that I see:

    '(The Allies) have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.'

You see, he 'feels impelled' to write feels, presumably, that he has something new to say  and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, ant that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting-up of a 'standard English' which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a 'good prose style'. On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meanings as clear as one can through pictures or sensations. Afterwards one can choose  not simply accept  the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. .If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists  is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase  some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse  into the dustbin where it belongs.

--- End quote ---

It was this kind of thinking that has shaped my paradigms and was behind the posts that I made in this discussion.
Knowing my own fallibility, I have gone over the discussion a few times looking for some flaw in what I may have written. Maybe out of over-familiarity with what I wrote, I was yet unable to see where this thinking could be flawed in any way which could materially affect the validity of the rationale that I employed.
Certainly, though you may see a flaw, you seem to have been unable to articulate it and demolish its foundation.

40hz:
re: Berkun and Orwell above...

Excellent articles. And quite valid in many respects. But it's interesting that both writers, who are/were professional journalists seem blissfully blind to their own writing biases and prejudices, which seem to presume a journalistic news reporting style is not only better, but more honest, and intellectually rigorous as well.

I disagree. Journalism is just one more tool to help us covey information and express opinion. It's neither a one-size-fits-all nor ideal tool for all forms of, or reasons for, writing. A short-word, active-tense, and "no metaphors please' style is frequently bland and tiring to read. And it removes much of the individualism and 'voice' from a piece of writing.

But Orwell was also a socialist - so he probably wouldn't have considered that a bad thing. ;)

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