 I've been looking forward to this talk a great deal because I think this is an effort to grapple very directly with the term itself that we're talking about resilience, not applied to any one discipline, but the concept. And our title for Jesse's talk, which I actually haven't discussed with Jesse whether he takes issue with it or not, because we want it to be cheeky, so we're calling it resilience and sustainability of buzzwords. There's an acknowledgement that there's a certain, you know, element of things getting in vogue and becoming fads around these terms, but as I mentioned earlier, I think for some serious good reasons, but we want it, Jesse, who is the editor-at-large at the Oxford English Dictionary and a frequent contributor to Slate, our other partner in the Future Tense venture, to riff a little bit on what it means for buzzwords like resilience to spill over into the broader culture, and I'm not sure exactly where all you're going to take us, but I'm eager to see, so Jesse, it's yours. Thanks very much. I took you, you were, that this is what you wanted me to talk about, so in fact I did talk about the sustainability of buzzwords. I hope that's okay. Because they are actually sustainable, even if it's in an unpredictable way. Just to get some definitions off the bat first, resilience itself is an interesting word. It comes from a Latin word that ultimately means something like, the etymological meaning, something like the act of avoiding, strangely enough, but the usual senses it's developed in Latin and other languages that it's come into are something a little bit different. The earliest sense here in English, which is first found in 1626 from Francis Bacon, is the action or an act of rebounding or springing back, rebound, recoil, this is an obsolete sense. It was in use a little bit in the 19th century, but hasn't really been seen since. The technical sense is elasticity, the power of resuming in original shape or position after compression, bending, et cetera, and this is the material science sense that Professor Vanderloo mentioned earlier. This is more recent, it dates from the early 19th century, and the main modern use, which is a figurative sense of this, is more recent still, so is this, there we go, sorry. This is sense five in OED, unless I otherwise say the definitions I give here are from the Oxford English Dictionary, and also, of course, we see that we do have four senses before this that we don't bother to cover because this is the subtleties of the use over time, but sense five is the quality or fact of being able to recover quickly or easily from or resist being affected by and misfortune, shock, illness, et cetera, robustness or adaptability. The earliest example we have of this is from 1657, this is just a apparently unremarkable book of history, but that writes, in their struggles with a ponderous power of England, the Scots discovered an invincible vigor, not only of resistance, but of resilience. Now, even this use remained relatively uncommon for some time. In the next slide, we can get a sense of just how buzzy this word is. As with many words that can vaguely fit into the category of business-y sorts of terms, resilience has had a more or less stable profile until around 1970, when it really takes off. I don't know if people are familiar with the use of the Google Ngram engine, which is a straightforward and easy to use tool for things that can be done a lot more sophisticatedly using some other things, but just, you know, punch something right in and see what you have, and here this is a chart of resilience from 1840 or so to 2000. And, you know, a small peak around 1940 or so, but really around, you know, 1917, you know, 1980, it really starts taking off. Of course, it's not possible to get an exact breakdown of the senses from this kind of graph. This is just the search of the word itself, but, you know, a hand inspection of some of these examples shows that it's clearly our meaning that we're talking about here. That's overwhelmingly common in this era. Now, the other word, the other notable word here is the word buzzword itself. The earliest example that anyone has found of buzzword is, in fact, curiously enough, an article in the Linguistics Journal American Speech written about the, quote, specialized vocabulary of, wait for it, students of the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard University, and this is a very short article. It took up less than half a page and was not primarily analysis, just pointing out some interesting things that had been found. And the article goes through a number of jargon terms that were in use at HBS, including ceremonial eyes, discusses that the student should know, quote, the value of using a crisis situation. Most of these words are in italics or in quotes in the article. Using a crisis situation for teaching, the student should marshal his evidence. If his analysis does not highlight the most important problems, he has poor focus, and if he fails to emphasize important recommendations, he will be accused of tinkering. If the sequence for the implementation of the recommendations is not good, it is a matter of poor timing. Excuse me. And to succeed, the student must, quote, get on top of the problem, must not shadow box, and if he can't, he might just as well turn in his suit. And so this was an article in December 1946. Within the next two years, American speech had published a number of additional articles about buzzwords and other contexts, so clearly they liked the concept very much at the time of buzzwords. So looking at the definition itself, there are two definitions, interestingly enough, that often sit uneasily together. The meaning of in the American speech article is sense one here, an important sounding, usually technical word or phrase, often of little meaning, used chiefly to impress laymen, and I have to give credit elsewhere. This definition is actually taken from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. The OED entry for buzzword was written a number of decades ago and hasn't yet been revised, so I will use that excellent definition there. Often we are, however, are talking about sense two, which is simply a fashionable expression of vogue word. So, and many of these overlap, but for example, to take examples of things that are very clearly one or the other, Web 2.0 is very clearly sense one. No one knows what it means. It doesn't mean anything. It changes every week. But sense two, an example would be, let's say, where's the beef? Vogue word, in use of TV commercial political context a little bit now, it's strictly historical. No one would say this and not look stupid. So by definition, sense two can't be resilient. If a word sticks around, it's no longer a vogue word. It's just a word. And if it goes away, well, then it's not resilient. But in practice, of course, there is some overlap here. So a buzzword is a vogue word that is also a disliked one or one that is felt to have little meaning. And often the dislike of words of this sort remains even after the vogueishness goes away. So what about the stickiness of terms like this? What is their resilience? In fact, the reality is that once words get a foothold in the language, they tend to stay around rather longer than is expected. This is true across many, many parts of language. But the most striking one is actually the resilience of slang, which is often felt, one of the main, there are many myths about slang that it's a code that kids use to confuse their parents, all sorts of things. Most things you know about slang are in fact not true. And one of the things you know about slang that is not true is that it's especially evanescent, that once a slang word reaches any kind of broad circulation, it either falls out of use or it becomes standard English. And this is not the case. A few examples of very, very many. The word booze, referring to alcohol, is still considered relatively slangy. This goes back to the 16th century. It's borrowing from Dutch. Chops, referring to the mouth or the lips, 17th century. My favorite example only because it's in such dramatically common use and no one ever regards this as not slang is the word cool, in more or less a sense fashionable, which depending on how you look at the evidence goes back to 1920s or 30s. Certainly by the 1940s, the modern sense is in use, very common, and it never goes out of fashion. The word cool has been cool. Since the 1940s, it has never been considered not slang. I think most people now would regard it as slang. And we keep using it. Similarly, and even longer, although its history is somewhat more complicated, it's the word hip or hip. They arise at almost the exact same time, around 1902, 1903, where its use has changed over time, but has been more or less in use for 100 years, for over 100 years, remains slang. And whatever we argue about what it means, what hipsters are, this sort of thing. The technical parts don't really matter. The point is it's still considered more or less fashionable word. It's still around. And my favorite example, which is a little bit outdated now, but fat, P-H-A-T, which got some attention in the late 80s, early 90s as a rap term, meaning fashionable or sexy. The earliest example people have found of this is 1963, which was, in fact, in an article in Life Magazine about what was called Negro jargon and listed several adjectives of approval, which included mellow, fat, spelled P-H-A-T, cool, and boss. In fact, the use of fat spelled F-A-T, meaning something almost the same, goes back to the early 19th century. So it's the spelling alone that people think is, oh, that's so very new, but even that's rather old, and the sense itself goes back even farther than that. But even non-slang examples, things that seem very recent can be a lot older than expected. So internet abbreviations or texting abbreviations, depending on what you call them, many of these are not all that new. So IMHO goes back to the early 1980s. LOL goes to the late 1980s. OMG for OMG goes back to the 1910s. The first two, IMHO and LOL, do both appear first in context of electronic communication, but a long way away. This is decades already. These are not things that just came up last year. So what about things that are more typically regarded as buzzwords? I gathered a few terms randomly, that as I wasn't specifically looking for ones that are old. And here are some examples of things, and also looking at lists of what people describe as buzzwords or what people say they don't like. So a few examples. Paradigm shift, conceptual or methodological change in the theory or practice of a particular science, or discipline, more usually in the extended sense, any major change in technology, outlook, et cetera. This is of course from Thomas Kuhn, the structure of scientific revolutions. 1962, very old, very well established. Content provider, a person who or organization that furnishes the matter of substance related in active communication, specifically a company that writes or produces material for dissemination by another agency, VNA of various frequently electronic media. This seems like the archetypal term of the internet age. In fact, the earliest example of this also, 1962. In this sense, the very specific sense referring only to electronic media comes later, but not all that much later. Even by the 1980s, content itself, meaning material produced by content providers, let's say, material irrespective of how it's produced. In computing context by 1982. Again, long before the era where people think, well, we're completely dominated by computers and everything we do is online. That's how old a lot of these terms are. Prioritize one of the widely disliked terms to give priority to. First example of this, it's probably earlier than this now. 1954 and in that very first example is described as a firmly embedded in the speech of government workers. Which, of course, not only suggests that it's much older, but this is why people don't like terms associated with one or another disliked group. And I'll get to another example of that later. In the same sort of family as prioritize, finalize, by the way, goes back much, much longer. But incentivized, to motivate them, to provide an incentive for, et cetera. First example of that, 1968, well over 40 years old. Even the shortening in scent, 1977. This is not a very new thing. Impact, people, anyone wants to dislike that impact, meaning to effect, let's say, goes back to the 1950s. Exit strategy, plan for withdrawal early 1970s. Proactive, innovative, let's just say, goes back to 1951. The early examples do tend to be from books about the psychology of leadership. So business or psychological sense, even then, but very old. One of the disliked examples you come across all the time to think outside of the box. And everything related to that inside the box, out of the box thinking and so forth. Again, over 40 years old here, 1971, is the first example that we know of this. So this was a whole pile of examples, which really were relatively random. I didn't go looking for things that are older than you think, although I did avoid things that were very, very strictly connected to the most modern internet developments. These are old, the 1950s, 60s, and 70s for most of these. And even in the case of the computer-related ones, the very early 1980s at latest. So what is the purpose of them? What is the purpose of buzzy words? Do they have a purpose? Well, buzzy words are useful to distinguish buzzy things. Obviously, when things fall out of use or become so incorporated that they're familiar, we don't need the word anymore. That's how things become non-buzzy. People ask all the time, well, what words do you take out of the dictionary? The OED never removes words, but that's a separate thing. The purpose of the OED is historical. So if something was part of the language in the 16th century, we want to know about it, and we will keep it in. So once we make it, and where historical documents in itself, once we include something, it stays in. But for trade dictionaries, the regular one-volume things you buy in a bookstore or used to buy in a bookstore, people say, well, when do you take words out? Or what are examples of things that you've removed? They're never interesting. That is, once you've decided to pull them out, it's because you haven't heard them, because they're a name for something that you didn't even know ever existed, or for any various reasons that they don't exist, and you don't care about them, so you take them out. So journalists are always disappointed when you give them anything that you've removed from recent editions. But or they can become incorporated or just become not all that interesting anymore. So information superhighway, computing and telecommunications, a router network for the high speed transfer of information, especially a proposed national fiber optic network in the United States, or be the internet. I would first of all point out in passing, this goes back to the early 1980s as well. But now this is a part of our life. We don't need a florid term like this. You know, when we didn't have the internet, when most people weren't on the internet, you know, this sounded like an interesting metaphor, and it was something we could talk about in Al Gore and invented the internet and all this. But now there was, we wouldn't use a term like this. We're all online all the time. We don't have to talk about it in this way. So at this point, and much more recently, tweet, let's say, you know, tweet is not a buzzword either. It's just a word. You know, no one talks about tweeting, no one uses the word tweet to show off, to be humorous, to call attention to anything. And people don't use it to mock this new fangled thing that, you know, those people use, but that no one else really gets either. You know, there's no other term for it. It's what we do. And that's the end of it. Two years ago, that wasn't the case, but, you know, things can change rapidly with technological developments. And a similar comparison, slightly older, but relevant for this is, you know, the use of Google is a verb. This started getting media attention in mid-2001, but you could find examples in 1999, barely after Google itself launched. This is a relative eternity, given the state of internet search technology at the time. Even in this case, pretty much all of the examples from 2001 are rewrites or references to a single New York Times article about using Google to find information on one's dates. But even by 2003, we were pretty much done seeing general media running articles saying, ooh, yes, it's a verb. So going back to the difference between types of buzzwords and their purpose, here's a very classic, or the recent example of one view of this. Oops, sorry. Slid off the page a little bit there, sorry. This is a Dilbert cartoon. Manager says, moving forward, we'll go after the low-hanging fruit at the end of the day. Ha, ha, ha. I like the way you used humor to mock the vacuous way managers speak. You know, which part was humor, and he's saying I'll be quiet now, I think. So this goes back to my point earlier about disliked buzzwords being associated with some disliked minority group, in this case corporate managers, and that they are considered to be meaningless. But when you look at this in detail, not only looking at the history of these terms, but looking at parallel terms, you find that the prejudices that you have often don't apply. There are many other expressions in the same categories as terms like this that are not disliked to this extreme extent. For example, instead of at the end of the day, you could say in the end, you could say in the final analysis, which sounds a bit buzzy, but does not appear on lists of words that people hate when all is said and done, things like that. So there are many other options you could use that people don't dislike as much, even though they're also, let's say, metaphorical. And you can also analyze the truth of the stated dislike of this. So at the end of the day is, in fact, it is not more common in business than other areas. It is around, in fact, somewhat less common in business than other areas. It's just that when you encounter things like this, you say, oh, that's a business term, that government employees use that, sports announcers, or teenagers, other disliked group who use things that people don't like. But you can study this. You can look it up systematically. You can get a random sample of examples and count how many of these are in business senses, and very often they're not. So these are prejudices, and their wrongness doesn't matter, as with other prejudices. Let's say New York is particularly violent or dangerous, or members of some disliked group, whether it's a race or a social class or people from a particular region are less intelligent than the speaker. The fact that these things will sustain, the prejudices will sustain, even if they are not true, so at the end of the day, an interesting thing, this was placed in the OED in the mid-1980s, and the earliest example then, because this is a very hard thing to search for by hand, was only from the early 1970s, but it was described at that point as a hack-need phrase. In fact, now that we have databases that we can search things for, it's much older than that. We have now found clear evidence going back to the 1840s, again, same sense, more or less, meaningless figurative example, meaning in the end. But examples from authors ranging from Disraeli to Auden, major writers. It was originally most common in British use, but it's now spread. And exactly why this one has received so much ire when similar phrases have gotten off Scott Free is unclear, but that's just the way things work. You dislike things, you can't necessarily predict why that's going to be the case. As Hamlet once said, there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. So, and even so, in the case of the Dilbert manager here, sounding like a manager is in fact something that one has to do. Avoiding things, saying things you don't really mean, this is something that humans need to do from time to time. So, rejecting it merely because it's management speak isn't necessarily bad. You have to do what you have to do. So, I can't conclude with any strict advice. I mean, we've seen that Atlanta is a beacon of both despair and hope and that we need both resilience and control. So, in terms of buzzwords, if things are buzzwords for a reason, that's great. If they're buzzwords that are not for a reason, that's also great. We just have to deal with it. People will use things they use and people will dislike things they use regardless of any kind of systematic way we can examine it. And the language evolves in a way that is useful to the people who use it. And that's pretty much the way language works. Thank you.