Deliver us from 'deliver'

I now realise that I was wrong. Partially, at least. A while ago I wrote to Lucy Kellaway to complain about one of her pet complaints. She writes a pugnacious and witty column for the Financial Times, whose message, as she describes it, is the same every week: plug in your brain. One drum she likes to beat is the ‘deliver’ drum. ‘Deliver’, she insists, is ‘only acceptable when referring to something that can be transported in a van’. If companies can’t strap shareholder value onto a truck, they shouldn't claim that they can deliver it. I took umbrage with this argument—so much umbrage that actually I wrote an email to her. (It is, of course, essentail that  journalists at the nation’s best daily newspaper hear about what I think.) I protested thus:

If you can deliver babies, sermons and punches, if you can deliver a criminal up to the authorities and be delivered from evil by God, why can't you deliver shareholder value? If you can coin both words and currencies, if you can unearth both cabbages and conspiracies, why can't you deliver both parcels and performance?

In other words, if we can already use deliver in a zillion ways, and if that’s true of zillions of other words too, then why complain about one particular usage?

As I said, though, I now realise that I was wrong.

It’s not that my argument doesn’t stand; it’s just that it’s irrelevant. The problem isn’t that deliver is being used in a new way. The problem is that the new way of using deliver is so general that almost no company should use it of themselves. To deliver—as used by companies who don’t actually deliver stuff in vans—is to supply or produce, to come up with the goods. These categories include virtually everything done by everyone in every walk of life. Farmers deliver (crops), Apple delivers (polished technology), and opium dens deliver (exotic experiences). These varied activities are homogenised by deliver, their distinctive spice suppressed by a bland commonality.

This generality partly explains why the word is so popular. It’s never the best word, but it’s always a convenient one. Deliver is like a Swiss army knife—you wouldn’t use it for building a shed or a house, but it’s handy in a pinch. David Cameron ‘delivered’ no fewer than eight times at PMQs last week, and no wonder, as it’s tricky to select the best verb when you’re pursued by Parliamentary bloodhounds. (Although he can overdo it. When asked how the EU renegotiations were going, he once responded, “I think I’ve got a track record of delivery in Europe that can help to deliver these changes.”)

But if a company isn’t about to be eaten alive by a Right Honourable, and if it wants to say what it does in particular (as opposed to what every company does in general), then it should take the time to pick more specific and more interesting verbs. Apple innovates, farmers cultivate and harvest, opium dens intoxicate, and, yes, delivery men deliver things in vans.

The same is true of two other ubiquitous words, value and solution. They’re too ordinary, too insubstantial. Most businesses create value, unless they’re straightforwardly wasteful. And most businesses provide solutions, since providing a solution just means helping someone do something new or better. Streetlights are an illumination solution. Lord of the Rings creates value as a fantasy narrative enjoyment solution. And if we want all three in one windy phrase: the London Underground creates value by delivering capital city transport solutions.

These are boring words. They’re vacuous universals, so true of everyone that they belong to no one. Avoid them.

LA Fitness' Elegant Phrasing

Sometimes writing is deceptively good. Ordinary-looking phrases can be packed with extraordinary cunning. One example is the slogan of LA Fitness, We’ll get there together. It sounds simple. All of the words are common, and it feels like a mundane encouragement. But it’s brilliant for three reasons.

Firstly, the slogan cleverly dispels the two most common fears about going to a gym. People commonly fear that going to the gym won’t help: they’ll never lose weight, they’ll never get fit, and they’ll probably never turn up anyway. The slogan tells us that we will. It’s inevitable. We will get there. People also fear that the gym will be intimidating, filled with scary, shredded fanatics. The slogan assures the reader that we will get there together. LA Fitness is a community. No one looks down on anyone else because its members are there for each other. This also supports the first point: you will get there, because we will help you.

Secondly, the structure of the slogan is powerful and elegant. Notice its beat: we’ll get there / to-ge-ther. Two three-syllable feet, each of which stresses the middle syllable. Notice the sound too: we’ll get there / to-ge-ther. In each triplet the g sound is followed by a th sound. The balance of the triplets sounds pleasing and fluent.

Thirdly, you can express the phrase in a variety of tones. If you want to sound cheerful and conversational, just let it roll of the tongue. Unlike many slogans, this one is normal enough and rhythmic enough that it doesn’t sound weird to say (as opposed to Accenture’s preposterous motto, High Performance. Delivered.) If you wanted to sound powerful and commanding, just stress the hard gs. One can imagine an LA Fitness coach making an affirming, presidential hand gesture on each beat.

The result is highly impressive: a versatile and elegant slogan that subtly banishes one’s fears. And they did it without using a word that a three-year-old couldn’t understand.

Postmodernism, and the bizarre way that evangelicals define 'religion'

Why don’t gay groups like calling themselves homosexual? Why should you avoid using ‘capitalism’ to talk about capitalism? And why have evangelicals redefined the word ‘religion’? The answer is that modernism was wrong about language.

Language has drift, and capitalism has a bad rep

One great contribution of Postmodernism has been to point out that language is not neutral. Modernism got it wrong: language is not a transparent medium, words do not represent things unproblematically. Rather, words are steeped in cultural prejudices and loaded with public presuppositions—ingrained grooves that carry one in certain directions.

This is obviously true of certain phrases. If I said that in 2007, CDOs had lulled bankers into a false sense of …, you’d immediately think ‘security’. People rarely seem to be lulled into anything else.

But these ingrained groves don’t just hurry our thoughts towards certain words, but also towards certain ideas. We start to associate particular concepts with words, associations which influence the way we think and speak, associations which are governed by the views of our community or culture.

Take the word ‘capitalism’. It didn’t always conjure up warm feelings before the 2007 crash, it was strongly linked to greedy bankers afterwards, and since Piketty it suddenly sends one off down some mental train track thinking about inequality. If one wanted to praise that ‘economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state’, one might even want to avoid using the word capitalism altogether. As our culture changes, the value and direction of words changes too.

Community meanings and homosexuality

Postmoderns also tell us that every community moulds language to justify its beliefs and practices. Members of different communities might use the same word, but associate with it different ideas or even use it to mean something different. By shaping their language, communities can subtly shape the way their members think, arranging their thoughts so that the community’s values naturally seem correct.

One recent example is the way that certain groups variously call gay people gay or homosexual. I just typed ‘homosexuality choice’ into Google, and four of the top five results were:

Yes, Homosexuality Absolutely Is a Choice - Huffington Post

Being Gay Not a Choice: Science Contradicts Ben Carson

Are you born gay or is it a choice? - PinkNews.co.uk

Homosexuality and choice - Conservapedia

The trend roughly held through the rest of the results. The anti-gay websites call gay people homosexual, and the pro-gay sites call them gay. Why? Well, says Wikipedia,

some recommend completely avoiding usage of homosexual as it has a negative, clinical history and because the word only refers to one's sexual behavior (as opposed to romantic feelings) and thus it has a negative connotation.

Perhaps those who think that being homosexual is a choice prefer the word homosexuality because it sounds more like a curable disease, while those who think that being gay isn’t a choice use the word gay because it sounds more neutral and harmless. This may or may not be precisely true, but I think the general point stands. Different groups are choosing their own vocabularies because those vocabularies subtly support their positions.

The funny way that evangelicals define ‘religion’

Another example is the extraordinary way that many Anglo-American evangelically-leaning protestants use the word ‘religion’. (I’ll call them evangelicals from now on. It’s inaccurate and ludicrously broad-brushed, but the label has some truth and it’s better than AAELPs.) They have developed a new meaning of the word which confuses those outside of their context. They say things like ‘religion never saved anyone’ and make videos entitled ‘Why I hate religion, but love Jesus’. And they use the word in this way because it subtly reinforces some of the distinctive beliefs of their community.

The word religion normally means (according to Google), the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.

On the other hand, when evangelicals use the word religion, they refer to a miserable man-made system of doing good, a laborious legalism by which people try to avoid God’s anger and gain his pleasure. Christianity, by contrast, isn’t primarily interested in what we do. For one, it’s concerned with what God has done for us in Christ’s substitutionary death for our sin. And secondly, it’s concerned with the possibility of joyfully obeying God as one’s Saviour and Lord. Hence, the logic goes, Christianity is not a religion.

Lots of things are now in the religion box that weren’t there before. In addition to all the world religions, there’s any sort of rules-first version of Christianity like those unpleasant American groups who attended church weekly and have very stringent ethics, but who are loveless and sneeringly proud of their personal morality.

It’s not surprising that evangelicals want a word to express the difference between do-gooding and having faith in Christ alone. The difference is critical—so critical that the protestant reformers died for it.

It is odd though that evangelicals have chosen to express this difference with the word ‘religion’. Many religions aren’t concerned with good works in the way that evangelicals understand the term, let alone with doing good works to appease the eschatological wrath of a deity. There are also religions that believe in a kind of grace. Shin Buddhism, for instance, holds that unconditional grace from Amida is a person’s only hope, as humans are too deeply rooted in karmitic evil to save themselves out by good deeds. Yet evangelicals tend to see the grace/works dichotomy in all belief systems.

Another odd thing about the choice of ‘religion’ is that ‘grace not works’ is neither only thing that differentiates Christianity from other religions, nor the most important thing. The Trinity, by contrast, is more central to the Bible’s message and more distinctive than grace, but consider how odd it would sound if evangelicals used the word ‘religion’ to mean ‘a system that denies the triunity of God’. This reflects, once again, the way that evangelicals often place such a heavy emphasis on grace-vs-works that they effectively reduce the Christian message to the doctrine of justification.

The choice also strongly enforces the uniqueness of Christianity, to the detriment of showing how other religions are like it. The usual usage of religion puts Christianity in the same box as all other religions; evangelicals use the word to differentiate it from all other religions. Christ is unique, and salvation is found in no one else, but the religion/Christianity differentiation feels so strict as to suggest there’s nothing commendable in other religions at all. In reality, there’s some bad and some good, and Christians should praise the good while showing how that good is best expressed in the Christian story.

The uniqueness of Christianity is enforced even more effectively because the new definition creates a verbal barrier to talking about Christianity and other religions in the same light. The word that you’d naturally use to compare religions (‘religion’) now means something different, so if you want to use religion in its normal sense, the sense that puts all religions are in the same box, you have to specify which definition of ‘religion’ you’re using. It’s awkward and prohibitive.

So the new evangelical definition of religion promotes the ideas that, (1) grace-not-works is the chief element of the Gospel, (2) world religions are all concerned with doing good works, (3) Christianity is different from other religions primarily because it believes in grace, and (4) Christianity is unique in every aspect, utterly different from other religions. The new definition also (5) constrains one’s language, making it harder to talk about how Christianity and other religions are similar.  These ideas subtly reinforce evangelicalism’s emphases on grace/works and the uniqueness of Christianity.

Or, at least, the new definition might do those things. There are ways to use it well, and contexts in which it might be powerful. In Britain, the works-grace distinction is not widely understood among non-Christians. Many do not realise the Bible says that only the cross can put one in the right with God or that grace might be prior to and might motivate doing good. Christians who wholeheartedly follow Christ are often told by non-Christians that they’re ‘so religious’, as if they followed Christ not from joy but rather through extreme willpower or madcap zeal. In this context, to respond by saying that ‘Christianity isn’t a religion’ can be a helpful polemic.

The new definition of ‘religion’ should, however, only be used polemically and irregularly. It’s too imbalancing and too distorting to be useful for making any substantial claim. Even if it was not born out of imbalance, it has grown popular through it and is used so widely and so assertively that it perpetuates that distortion.

Language is not neutral, and communities mould it to their advantage. And modernism was wrong.