Everyone stares quietly at the lonely bullet icons floating on the white background. Participants shuffle papers and sip coffee, staring with seeming unconcern at far corners of the room, waiting for someone else to volunteer some words to go on the chart – words that will be deemed unacceptable, of course.

After the pause has become sufficiently uncomfortable, someone ventures wording to go behind the bullets to represent what they think should be the conclusions of the study. There is zero chance that these words will survive. A feeling of resentment gathers among the other participants that their authority has been usurped by this pushy person.

Now a feeling of energy fills the room. The real work has begun – the wordsmithing battle has begun.

“I notice that you say in that first point that the committee recommends alternative A,” says one of the members. “Don’t you think that word is a little too strong. What happens if this doesn’t work out, and we’re blamed for the recommendation? I think we should use a more tentative word, like suggests.”

Then someone else objects. “But that word doesn’t carry the right nuance either. We were constrained to consider only the alternatives presented to us. Maybe none of them was really any good. We should use a comparative verb, like prefers.”

And so it goes on. This is only one word, and there are many others yet to engage. In contrast to the lethargy that had characterized the room earlier, now everyone is engaged and energetic. This is good stuff!

It seems to me that wordsmithing is the natural ground state of a committee preparing a report – the state that the committee always falls back into when external stimuli are removed. At a recent study I commented at one point in our deliberations that we had spent more time wordsmithing than we had on considering the substance of our report. Everyone looked at me blankly for a moment, and then resumed the wordsmithing. I got into it too. Doing wordsmithing really makes you feel like you’re accomplishing something.

It seems to me that language by its very nature is imprecise. I think of each word as inhabiting a fuzzy ball of uncertain semantic meaning. Moreover, the ideas we’re trying to express are fuzzy balls too, particularly when it’s a committee, each member of which has a slightly different interpretation of both the ideas and the words. The intended audience for the report will read something else entirely into the words anyway, and in my opinion, a lot of wordsmithing is wasted effort.

Whenever I think about wordsmithing, I recall with embarrassment a day some years ago when I took my management team offsite to write a mission statement for my research organization. We needed a sentence or two that would properly express an uplifting vision for what we’d like our lab to be in the near future. With great enthusiasm we started out with phrases like “leading the world in such and such.” But of course those words didn’t last long. Was ‘leading’ the right adjective, and did we really mean to say the ‘world’? How precisely did we want to describe the ‘such and such’ that we were supposed to ‘leading’ in?

About this time someone made a bold suggestion. The mission statement should be: “We do things for money.” That stopped discussion for a while. We all smiled, but I imagined each of thought secretly that was the only truthful mission statement we were going to hear.

Well, it was a long day of hard work, slugging out that mission statement, but we had our precious sentence. I went home tired and happy, feeling that it had been a successful exercise. I’d print the sentence here if I could remember it, but I can’t. On second thought, it would be too embarrassing to print anyway.

The next week we had a meeting of the whole organization, and I proudly presented our sentence. I wonder what the people were thinking. They probably thought that while they had been working hard trying to make money, these managers had spent a whole day crafting a silly sentence. I’m sure that by the end of the day, they had forgotten the sentence. By the end of the week, I’d forgotten it too.

By coincidence, there was a management meeting of the company’s executives the next week. Our chairman asked how many of us knew the corporate mission statement. I avoided his eyes, because I hadn’t a clue. Neither, apparently, did anyone else. The angry chairman pointed out that the mission statement was prominently displayed in the lobby, and we all passed it by every day.

So many words. So little meaning.

Robert Lucky