Blah Blah Blah Read online

  Plotting the Results

  It’s safe to assume that we will all have different levels of understanding of what each speaker was trying to say. But we will all agree that some of the quotes were quickly understandable and some were not. The first time I read (or heard) each, here is what I remember thinking:

  A VitaminWater

  I fully understand this

  I sort of understand this

  I don’t understand this

  B Obama on health care

  I fully understand this

  I sort of understand this

  I don’t understand this

  C Madoff’s investment strategy

  I fully understand this

  I sort of understand this

  I don’t understand this

  D Petraeus on Afghanistan

  I fully understand this

  I sort of understand this

  I don’t understand this

  E Sully on the Hudson

  I fully understand this

  I sort of understand this

  I don’t understand this

  In other words, of the five quotes (again, all delivered by prominent sources and all referring to critical aspects of contemporary life), only two—Petraeus and Sully—fit my personal criteria for the effective use of words: I understood them.

  Oog and Aag and Why Understanding Matters

  We’re going to come back to these quotes and the Blah-Blahmeter in a moment, but before we do, it will help to understand something about our brains. To help us, let’s meet two of our most ancient ancestors: Oog and Aag.5

  Our ancient ancestors.

  All of us—Oog and Aag included—like to understand one another. We can’t help it: Our brains are hardwired that way. Because confusion and uncertainty were dangerous to Oog and Aag, their brains evolved to take great pleasure in understanding things—especially each other. In fact, Oog’s and Aag’s brains rewarded them with a shot of feel-good dopamine each time they “got” an idea the other was trying to convey. (Ever feel that chill down the back of your neck when reading a thriller and you suddenly figured out whodunit? That’s the feel-good stuff. Now imagine if you could get that every time your boss started talking.) We are so familiar with this feeling that we have a universal image to illustrate it.

  The universal symbol for “I got it!”

  Millions of years ago, out there on the savanna, not knowing what was going on was the fastest way for Oog and Aag to die. They had brains that helped them make sense of things, but keeping those brains going required a lot of energy. So during their millions of years of development, Oog’s and Aag’s bodies made a trade-off: They’d sacrifice some strength, speed, and endurance in exchange for being able to understand each other. In Oog and Aag’s ancient world of constant life-and-death decisions, it proved to be worth the sacrifice.

  Today, when we find ourselves in a death-by-PowerPoint meeting, it pays to remember Oog and Aag and to stop kicking ourselves when we can’t stay focused. If we don’t understand instantly what the presenter is saying—and if we can’t figure out what to do about it and why it matters—we give up and look for something that will put our expensive-to-maintain brains to better use. But if we’re stuck in a conference room, there’s nothing else we can do. So our brains either start making stuff up (daydreaming and doodles) or go to sleep.

  That’s the real problem we face today: too many words with too little meaning coming at us too fast. This information rush interferes with our inner Oog and Aag and our ancient desire to understand one another. Either through boredom, befuddlement, or intentional distraction, any misuse of language that leads our brains to say “This is blah-blah-blah” must be avoided. At best, the blah-blah-blah puts us to sleep, and at worst it leaves us more confused than before.

  With that in mind, let’s get back to those five quotes and the Blah-Blahmeter.

  Blah-Blahmeter Filter No. 1: We “Get” the Message the First Time

  Starting at the top, the first criterion on the Blah-Blahmeter scale is whether Bon eps it picks up a signal at all: If the words are clear and effective, we’ll be so busy absorbing them that we won’t even see the needle budge. For example, Sully’s seven-word study in concise language pegs the needle on the good side. “This is the captain. Brace for impact” is pure meaning. There is no blah-blah-blah here to detect.

  “This is the captain. Brace for impact.” So clear that the needle doesn’t budge. No blah-blah. Nothing more needed for the message to be heard and understood.

  On my personal Blah-Blahmeter, this is also true of Petraeus’s words. “ ‘The oil spot’ is a term in counterinsurgency literature that connotes a peaceful area, secure area. So what you’re trying to do is to always extend that.” “The oil spot”6 is a metaphor that requires no expertise in military planning to instantly get: The army’s plan is to grow small secure areas in Afghanistan until they spread enough to link into larger secure areas. I don’t know if that strategy will work or not, but I have no problem understanding the idea.

  So let’s leave Sully and Petraeus aside. No blah-blah-blah, no Blah-Blahmeter reading.

  The Acid Test

  It’s when we don’t get quick comprehension that the needle starts twitching. That’s when we know one of two things: Either the message is beyond our understanding (in which case we need a more vivid explanation) or the technology of language is messed up.

  One Blah = Just Boring

  Once the Blah-Blahmeter needle starts jumping, the first stop on the scale is just plain “blah.” One blah indicates the benign but ham-fisted overuse of words that makes interesting ideas boring. This is Grandpa telling war stories. By rights, his should be a fascinating tale, but somehow it ends up putting the family to sleep.

  Grandpa telling war stories reads as one blah: He’s got a great story to tell, but his overuse of words puts everyone to sleep.

  Let’s go back and read the three remaining quotes again (recall that we’ve already discounted Sully and Petraeus as being too clear for the Blah-Blahmeter to detect). Read the three that remain (Coke, Obama, Madoff) and rank them again, only this time indicate your immediate response to each message, from bored to perplexed to mystified.

  Read one more time through the quotes (click here). Here are my responses:7

  A VitaminWater

  I’m too bored to care

  I guess there could be something there

  What the—???

  B Obama on health care

  I’m too bored to care

  I guess there could be something there

  What the—???

  C Madoff on investing

  I’m too bored to care

  I guess there could be something there

  What the—???

  Reading each quote a second time tells me that, of the three, President Obama’s is the one most difficult to comprehend, because of its quantity of words. “But the 20 percent that right now is still the holdup would have been a holdup if we had put forward a plan, hadn’t put forward a plan, had left it to Congress, had written it ourselves . . .” He’s clearly talking about something important to him (health care), but he seems to have so many things to say about it that his ideas crash into one another, the same way an old typewriter snarls up when someone types too quickly.

  In this case, my Blah-Blahmeter ranks Oba BIn er ma’s quote as just “boring”: a potentially interesting idea made unlistenable through broken language. Not intentionally foggy, not misleading, just too tiresome to follow.

  Which leaves us with two quotes to go.

  Two Blahs = We’re Fooling Ourselves

  The next stop on the Blah-Blahmeter scale doubles the ante. As we add a second blah, we get blah squared. At this level, our device is picking up more than just boring delivery; on the contrary, at blah squared we often find the cleverest use of words. They have to be clever, because here the words are masking an idea that isn’t there at all.

  The lack of an idea mas
ked by the fog of words bumps our scale up to the blah-blah level.

  Quote A, the one referring to the drink that’s “specially formulated with nutrients that enable the body to exert physical power by contributing to structural integrity of the musculoskeletal system,” is from the Coca-Cola Company. It is from the label on its subsidiary Glacéau’s Power-C VitaminWater bottle. This text was cited in a lawsuit brought against Coca-Cola by a consumer advocacy organization called the CSPI (Center for Science in the Public Interest).

  The CSPI filed suit in 2010, maintaining that the labels on the VitaminWater products gave misleading information about the nutritional benefits of “enhanced water” products, which the group argued were nothing more than sugar water. The CSPI alleged that Coca-Cola had knowingly created pseudoscientific language to intentionally delude consumers into believing that they were purchasing a product that was good for their health—when in fact the bottles contained more sugar than Coca-Cola itself.

  In their legal response, Coca-Cola’s lawyers defended the wording on the bottles by saying that the slogans printed on the bottles “describe only puffery” and that “no reasonable consumer could have been misled by VitaminWater’s labeling.”

  In other words, Coca-Cola’s own lawyers admitted that the company spent a lot of time and money writing words on their products that they never expected anyone to take seriously. Shameful? Yes. Surprising? Not really—after all, this is soda marketing.

  This is true blah-blah: the intentional misuse of words to create a fog—a fog that masks the lack of an actual fact or idea. It’s the same thing we’ve all done when we were supposed to have something intelligent to say but really didn’t have a clue. It’s the old “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, blind them with bull***t” axiom come to life.

  Blah squared emerges whenever we find ourselves at the morally neutral but intellectually dishonest position of verbally padd Bem">ualnformating our thoughts in order to make ourselves sound smarter than we are. Blah squared isn’t necessarily dangerous or malicious, but it is the beginning of a slippery slope of verbal self-delusion that, if unchecked, leads to the misguided belief that we understand an idea when in fact we don’t.

  Three Blahs = We’re Fooling Everyone

  At level three, three blahs appear—and now we’re in the verbal danger zone, the place where words become weapons. Blah cubed is the worst of language distortion, where words serve their opposite purpose—where they are intentionally used to mislead us from grasping the speaker’s real message.

  At full needle deflection, we’re seeing words used as weapons: They intentionally misguide us.

  We’ve only got one quote left and, challenging as it is, it is worth rereading if only for its sheer audacity. Through a brilliant mix of financial lingo and verbal sleight of hand equal to the best of magicians, Madoff Securities explained how the company’s investment strategy “worked”—an investment strategy that in 2008 would be exposed as a $21 billion fraud.

  Typically, a position will consist of the ownership of 30–35 S&P 100 stocks, most correlated to that index, the sale of out-of-the-money calls on the index and the purchase of out-of-the-money puts on the index. The sale of the calls is designed to increase the rate of return, while allowing upward movement of the stock portfolio to the strike price of the calls. The puts, funded in large part by the sale of the calls, limit the portfolio’s downside.

  Founder and chairman Bernard Madoff, who seven years before his arrest (and sentencing to 150 years in federal prison) told Barron’s magazine, “It’s a proprietary strategy. I can’t go into it in great detail,” was a master of blah cubed. His is an unsubtle example of what is a well thought-through and highly nuanced abuse of language: Mask a rotten idea by using highly charged words that throw listeners to distraction.

  The path to blah cubed is duplicity defined: Say whatever you want to say (no matter how vile, rotten, or wrong), but say it by saying something else. Here at the extreme edge of blah-blah-blah, words cease to serve as a means of clarification and instead become weapons of mass destruction.

  Moving Down the Blah-Blahmeter Dial

  That’s the first horizontal span of our Blah-Blahmeter scale: From Clear to Boring to Foggy to Misleading, we’ve mapped out the dangers of increasing blah-blah-blah. But there’s more. To make our Blah-Blahmeter useful not only in measuring incoming messages but also in improving our own, we’re goi But outng to add three more filters in the next chapter. These filters will detect deeper meanings in the incoming message, giving us a greater sense of how to improve, illuminate, or disarm the speaker’s real message—even if the speaker is us.

  Especially if the speaker is us.

  Blah-Blahmeter Basics

  Those are the basics of the Blah-Blahmeter, enough to get started using it: We listen for someone’s message, detect our immediate level of understanding, and plot it on the scal

  e. If the message was clear, no problem: We take it in and prepare a response. If the message was unclear, at least now we have the means to figure out why—and understand what that lack of clarity means to the speaker and to us.

  CHAPTER 2

  Advanced Blah-Blahmeter Use

  You Have a Choice . . .

  This chapter dives into the complete Blah-Blahmeter in depth: what the remaining scales mean, the linkages between the different levels and the speaker’s likely intent, and how the “Vivid Thinking” tools in the rest of this book can best be applied to clear things up.

  If you’d like to learn much more about the Blah-Blahmeter and its uses, please keep reading. However, if you’d prefer to begin exploring what Vivid Thinking means and how it can keep all our ideas on the good side of the Blah-Blahmeter scale, go ahead and skip the rest of this section for now. You can always come back later.

  The Full Blah-Blahmeter

  When complete, our Blah-Blahmeter will contain sixteen measurements: the four we’ve already placed along the top of the scale, along with three sub-measurements below each. This combination will not only show how well we “got” the message to begin with (already accounted for along the top scale); it will also measure the clarity of the speaker’s original idea, give us insight into the speaker’s actual intention, and, lastly, illustrate how Vivid Thinking can help eliminate blah-blah-blah at any level.

  The full Blah-Blahmeter scale. When complete, we’ll not only know whether we “got” the message or not; we’ll also be clearer regarding the speaker’s original idea, glean insight into the speaker’s intent, and begin to see how Vivid Thinking is useful for eliminating any blah-blah-blah in our own messages.

  Blah-Blahmeter Row 2: The Idea Is . . .

  The fundamental premise of this book is that the purpose of language is to quick Ce ily and effectively convey ideas in a way that requires the least possible effort on the part of the recipient.8 If language breaks along the way, it’s a bad thing. If we can’t “get” the speaker’s idea, it doesn’t matter how lovely his words might be—they’re still the wrong words.

  The second row on the Blah-Blahmeter scale reflects this. In direct correlation to the effectiveness of the speaker’s message, we can deduce the nature of his original idea. When a message is quickly clear to us, it is almost always a simple expression of a well thought-through idea.9

  When a message is quickly clear, it is almost always expressed simply.

  On the other hand, when we become bored with an explanation, it’s almost always because the presenter loses us in complication—an indication that the speaker either hasn’t taken the time to simplify or that he doesn’t understand his idea himself.

  When a message is boring, it’s almost always because the speaker hasn’t taken the time to simplify.

  When a speaker’s words are foggy, the first thing we should ask ourselves is whether we can detect a real idea buried in there at all; more often than not, the fog is an attempt to hide . . . nothing. Since there’s nothing there, the speaker’s only option is to tu
rn on the blah-blah. In the hands of expert spinmeisters, in-over-their-heads creative directors, and on-twenty-four-hours-a-day cable news anchors, this intentional whipping up of steam can last for hours, leaving listeners so befuddled that we simply cave in.