Memorable Quote

Its not often I find myself reading a magazine and the author's words stand out as being profound. But reading this month's Nick Hornby monthly column 'Stuff I've been reading' in Believer magazine, I found a line that stood out from Nick's always entertaining column.

"... I found myself wondering whether the complication of language is in inverse proportion to the size of the subject under discussion."

You can follow the link to see the whole article, but the context of Nick's observation was comparing two author styles around the use of the word 'death' and the author's topic. One author used death in reference to her country plagued by corruption, terrorism and despotism. The other author uses it to describe bored spouses in a middle-class marriage. I haven't read either book, so I'll take Nick's description at face value.

But really I find that today especially in the business world we often try to make things sound bigger, more important and vital to the health of the business by using language that hides the true meaning of what it is we're trying to accomplish. The flip side is IMing, texting or other new forms of communication. Here even the most important events are whittled down to as few characters as possible. Checkout the Wikipedia entry on SMS.

Of course the lone exception to this is the US Government. They manage to make both the simplest and most complex issues sound simultaneously trite & insignificant and important & impossible to comprehend.