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Justifying Jargon
Last month we attended the joint conference of the National Center of Nonprofit Associations and the Alliance for Nonprofit Management in San Diego, where capacity building came up more than once and figured prominently in the titling of several sessions. Exasperated by overuse of the phrase, one conference presenter refused to use capacity building, referring to it instead as "you know what."
This month for the first time we stumbled on Tony Proscio's work for the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. (Please see the description of the foundation's work on jargon in this issue's "In Brief.") He has authored two essays, "In Other Words" and "Bad Words for Good," which outline misused words and phrases that crop up in speaking and writing in foundations. Not surprisingly, capacity makes an appearance. Proscio decries the vagueness of the term, "As long as the term is meant as a deliberately nebulous reference to all the myriad things that make organizations run, it does its sloppy job reasonably well." He goes on to wonder if the comparison the term suggests is even appropriate: "[T]he word invokes the strange metaphor of a jug or canister, whose 'capacity' is measured by its ability to hold whatever is dumped into it. Is this really the image we want for high-performing organizations?"
Whether simply tired of overused buzzwords, as the conference presenter, or whether attacking vague or inaccurate language and the misunderstandings that arise from it, as the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, we all have words we'd be happy to never hear again. But there are other words that we simply can't give up--or aren't willing to give up without a fight. Those we should reclaim by appropriate and controlled use.
In true sophist style, one article in this issue weds two questionable terms to produce the perhaps doubly offensive idea of a capacity continuum. "The Capacity Continuum" looks at the interrelated role that individuals, organizations, and communities--and the networks that tie them all together--play in capacity building. While capacity building isn't a term we're particularly enamored of, we do believe it and capacity are meaningful--albeit unspecific and generic. As for continuum, Proscio says, "Now every activity that lasts longer than a day and connects ever-so-glancingly with any other activity is officially a CONTINUUM, and wants to be discussed in the reverent tones reserved for things with Latin names." Well, we absolve ourselves of any dispensation to the pretentious and argue that we use continuum in its true meaning: a coherent whole.
"Learning Communities: From Trekkies to Techies" risks using community. We use the word more strictly than what Proscio calls "the annoying sense in which it describes any group of people with practically anything in common," looking at how online communities aren't really communities if there's no meaningful interaction among members.
Throughout this issue of The Sophist, you'll encounter terms that appear on Proscio's cautionary list, but we've made an effort to use them accurately, not in deference to jargon. The work of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and Proscio's essays got us thinking--and that's what we hope this edition of The Sophist will do for you.
The Editors
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