Opinion

buzzwords suck

Be original

By Mike Hartwell

Posted on April 14, 2003, at 12:00 a.m.

Does anyone else cringe when they hear a buzzword? I know I do. I’ll be in class and the lecture will be spiked with the dreadful phrase “think outside the box.” Is it just me? Does anyone else out there see this phrase for what it is, a half-hearted stab at bottling creativity?

The puzzle that spawned it was nothing special. I mean, wow, touch every dot in a 3-by-3 grid with four straight lines without lifting your pencil. Sounds tough. It is, until you extend two of the lines outside the grid. It was cute. It didn’t stand out that much from any other brainteaser in the back of a cheap activity book. Now it’s just a good luck charm for coming up with multi-task, wireless, new and improved paradigms.

The widespread use of “think outside the box” reflects the great American sport of choosing factions based on the cleverness of their catch phrases. Slick presentation is more important than substance; as long as it’s new, as long as it shines, as long as it’s different. We want cheap, easy thrills. It doesn’t matter how vacant or empty they are. That’s why we have buzzwords. They’re easy. They are the polar opposite of creativity.

When you use a buzzword, you leave a big fill-in-the-blank in your sentence. The listener is forced to pencil in a meaning for you. Thus, buzzwords help pass the creative buck. They defuse responsibility from upper management and force the blue collar worker to operate with little to no instructions.

Telling yourself you’re going to start “thinking outside the box” is self-defeating. It’s like how high school freshmen get mad at their parents for singing the “Happy Birthday” song. They resent the song, thinking it’s just for children, so they respond by childishly scowling and complaining. You’re not really grown up until you can have “Happy Birthday” sung to you without fearing that your maturity is threatened. It’s a card from the same pack. Unoriginal people want to exercise creativity, so they uniformly adopt the same tired, hollow mantra.

I can’t see any vision or inventiveness resulting from the popularization of this phrase. It’s something for human resource managers to stack on their shelf next to their hardcover copy of Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.”

Creativity can’t be taught, especially to the kind of people who drink name-brand, bottled water and order commemorative plates. There’s no easy solution in pill form. It doesn’t come off of an assembly line.

Creativity is a delicate beast and it can’t be caged. Any plans of organizing human thought onto a clean, linear path will only end in disarray and chaos. You can tell yourself that you’re going to start thinking in some new realm, but you won’t. Creativity is a gift. It can be nurtured when it sprouts up but can’t be taught or won over with cheap parlor tricks.

Reject any suggestions to regulate or tame your thought process. “thinking outside the box” needs to be packed up and left in the attic between your photo albums and the NordicTrack.

Mike Hartwell is a sophomore journalism major.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2003, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.