Following are excerpts from Bad Words for Good: How Foundations Garble Their Message and Lose Their Audience. The book, by Tony Proscio, is to be released this month by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.
convener, convening
Although these words are correct English, they are pretentious and antiquated. In modern-day use, the word is nothing more than a posh disguise for ordinary meetings, conventions, and conferences. The self-styled convener is simply whatever outfit hosts the meetings.
There is, in fact, something slightly pathetic about the bloated self-importance of the convene clan. To insist on referring to the drudgery of meetings and conferences as if they were a summons to Buckingham Palace suggests a life starved for excitement.
Said one foundation officer: “Whenever I’m invited to a ‘convening,’ I make it a point to decline. If they’re calling it that, they must be desperate for participation, and that means it’s the last place I’ll want to be.”
infrastructure
Infrastructure’s Latin roots strictly mean what lies beneath (or within) things that are built. In that sense, steel girders and wooden beams are infrastructure. Subways and sewer pipes, too.
The problem with infrastructure is that, as metaphors go, it is often a good one -- too good by half. Yes, many organizations do need to improve the hidden, back-office functions that are the bureaucratic equivalent of beams and girders. New projects usually do need offices, computers, phone lines, bank accounts, technical advisers, and contractors -- all the mundane rigmarole that stands behind a successful effort. The word fits those usages, but it fits a great many others, too. Everything, one presumes, would benefit from the strengthening of some hidden component parts. Is everything, therefore, an infrastructure project?
The word has been applied metaphorically to so many things that it is now quite impossible to know which thing it is supposed to invoke in any given context. In most cases, it is simply a grandiloquent stand-in for “component parts,” “elements,” “organization,” or, in management circles, “administrative functions.” Clarity would usually be served best by saying just which of those things is meant.
leverage
The head of an exceptionally successful (and incidentally “well leveraged”) nonprofit organization gave this succinct definition of philanthropy’s favorite buzzword: “If I give a dollar and you give a dollar, and we get the guy next door to give a dollar, we each got 200 percent leverage. The budget may be $1 million, and we’re still $999,997 away from it, but we’ve got excellent leverage.”
More and more observers of philanthropy and fund raising treat leverage as an automatic fraud alarm, and it is hard not to agree with them. The word is meant to imply (indeed, in most common usage it actually means) that someone has done something timely and clever that induced others to do a great deal more toward the same goal. Yet often it is used to describe things done by any group of people that they would otherwise have done anyway.
“This grant leverages the contributions and talents of many participating organizations in the community,” said a foundation report. The clear implication: By making this grant, we induced “many organizations” to take part in something that would not otherwise have interested them. By further implication, the sum of all those efforts will be worth far more than we, the frugal foundation, are planning to pay. Now, here is the reality in that case, as in so many others: The “many organizations” were already rolling ahead on the project in question, and the foundation’s contribution simply helped one left-out group to join the caravan, rather than being stranded on the roadside. That was kind of the foundation, and maybe a good thing for all involved. But was it leverage?
operationalize
Those who set out to cure jargon and other self-important speech take their place in a humblingly long line of earlier scolds -- a lineage stretching back at least to Aristophanes -- who had in their day no more success than this essay is likely to have now. The prospect of success, in fact, never seems dimmer than when one confronts American jargon’s answer to original sin, the perennial habit of attaching -ize to everything in sight (maximize, strategize, localize, institutionalize, prioritize, and on and on).
The problem with operationalize is not just that it’s ugly, but that it is so sprawling a word -- like an ill-planned building with too many additions -- that it suggests something complicated, demanding, and obscure. It tries to awe the reader with its sheer unruliness as if it contains so many ideas that it might be dangerous to unleash them all. Yet the closer you look, the more likely the thing is to mean nothing more than “do.” It’s a Texas-size word that, as Texan Lyndon B. Johnson once said of some Lone Star poseur, turns out to be “all hat and no cattle.”
partnership, to partner
In the idealistic world of civic and charitable institutions, partnership has lately taken on the rosy mystique of the more mawkish fairy stories, with the nonprofit grantees in the role of Cinderella.
“In this program,” says one princely foundation, “we invite our program partners to share in more than the funding of individual initiatives, but in a whole range of supportive interactions.”
The first mystery in that sentence is the peculiar phrase “program partners,” which turns out to be a euphemism for “grantees.” The next is those unspecified “supportive interactions,” in which a jaundiced eye might detect a “come-up-and-see-my-etchings” quality. The problem with this image of partnership is not so much that the intentions might not be honorable, but that the label is so broad that one can scarcely guess what intentions might be crouching behind it.
This ambiguity would be harmless enough, on a par with the gauzy endearments in Valentine cards, were it not for the inflated expectations to which the word gives rise on all sides. The surprising fact is that, common as this blushing sentimentality has become, it most often goes unexamined. Dictionaries and law books tend to take a far more detached and mathematical view of partnership, emphasizing explicit agreements in which control, expenses, profits, and losses are all divided in fixed proportion to each partner’s share in the capital and risk of the enterprise.