On good writing

I was reading the Sunday Canberra Times a couple of days ago over a morning cup of tea.  A short syndicated article in the Sunday Focus section alerted me to the fact that this year is the 60th anniversary of the death of British writer, Eric Arthur Blair (aka George Orwell).  George Orwell is one of my favourite authors; up there with Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Milan Kundera, Wallace Stegner, and Patrick White.  Funnily enough, all those writers might be termed under the heading, ”classic” fiction, establishing my literary preferences very clearly.  I do enjoy the odd contemporary novel but for the most part, I enjoy the story and the writing of my classic literary heroes.

I first read George Orwell at school when our English class studied the novel, Nineteen Eighty Four.  I later re-read the book and saw the film starring actors John Hurt and Richard Burton. I also went on to read Animal Farm and Keep the Aspidistra flying.  I enjoyed all three novels immensely.  I will have to find these three books at home for a re-read.  One thing I can say, is that all three novels were brilliantly written and totally absorbing. 

Each story had a significant message.  I always found the message in Nineteen Eighty Four as being equally applicable to the communists (the focus for Orwell) as for the “democracies” when it came to influencing and manipulating public opinion through various methods of propaganda, political “spin”, and news bias.  And Animal Farm was, and still is, quite a metaphor for management science as well as for politics!

A feature of the writing was its quality.  The Canberra Times article (“Orwell still packs a punch”) lists six qualities that Orwell recognised as being indicators of good writing:

1. “never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print
2. never use a long word when a short word will do
3. if it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out
4. use the active rather than the passive
5. never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent
6. break any of these (above) rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous”

These are sound writing principles, albeit I see some scope for compromise depending on the appropriate context in which one writes.  Nevertheless, Orwell’s six writing principles essentially say to write for your reader – your audience – so that they have no difficulty in understanding what you have to say.

I think the principle of making what we have to say understandable to our audience is very good advice indeed.  The challenge for all of us is to keep good writing principles in mind in all our communications.

And so off to the bookshelves at home to search for my Orwell novels to be read again….sometime in the near future!

On communication, language and meaning

Last night I watched a movie on DVD called Where the green ants dream.  The film came out in 1984 and was directed by noted German director Werner Herzog.  I remember seeing the movie at the cinema back then and not quite fully coming to terms with the storyline.  When I saw the DVD of the movie in a shop recently, I bought it to have another look.

The film is about a land claim by a clan of Australian aboriginals of a sacred site in an area where a mining company is prospecting and drilling for uranium.  The aboriginals claim the land is sacred because it is where the green ants live until they are ready to fly east, after which the cycle of renewal begins again.  The story is couched in terms of birth, death and rebirth.  The mining company, with all their drilling and explosions, are at risk of waking and disturbing the green ants and breaking the dreamtime cycle.

The first observation about the land predicament is the difference in the explanations given by the aboriginal people and the white mining company representatives concerning the importance of the land in question.  For the aborigines, the land is a sacred symbol of life while for the white man, the land is something to be exploited and used for riches.  The meaning surrounding the same patch of land is totally different and dependant on the contextualised stories of each group – the green ant story from the aboriginals and the development and progress story of the white people.  This is a common point of difference between indigenous populations and settler groups in North America and Africa as well.

This isn’t a film review, so I just want to point out one particular scene in the film when the aboriginals and the mining company representatives are in court.  They are in court to settle ownership of the land in question.  At one point, an elderly aboriginal man stands up and walks to the witness box in the middle of another witness’s evidence.  The witness steps down and the aboriginal elder takes his place and starts to speak in his own language.  The judge is confused but sympathetic and asks if the man can speak English or whether anyone can translate.  The judge looks at his notes and identifies the elderly aboriginal man, saying “I thought this man was mute!”.

One of the other aboriginal men, one of the plaintiffs, stands and tells the judge that there is no one in the court room, or in the country, or in the world that can understand this man – he is the last living survivor of his language and that is why he is referred to as mute.

If we cannot understand what people are saying (or writing for that matter) we do not have communication. Unless somebody can translate the meaning for us, it will be as if we are mute.  In all our communications, we must try and put ourselves in the shoes of the other so that we can find the best way to ensure the meaning of our message is understood.  At the same time, when we try to put on the shoes of the other person, there will be times when we also have to look beyond just the shoes, but to consider the whole contextual environment in which those shoes have walked.  This is not always easy and usually forgotten in our rush to speak.

Without good communication in all its forms, there can be no knowledge management.

On the power of telling a story

It is impossible, in this historic time, not to comment on the US Presidential election. In particular, the significance and style of President-elect Barack Obama’s “Change has come to America” speech in Chicago, Illinois. The full text of the speech is available here. Mark the date in your diary – an historic day - the 4th November 2008 (US time).

It wasn’t the normal political speech, although no doubt constructed with the same careful consideration. Obama’s speech was personal – it reached into the personal experiences of all who were listening but also connected us to the future – the future of our kids.

The obvious story in the speech concerned the theme of change and hope personified in the life of a 106 year old woman from Georgia (USA) - Ann Nixon Cooper. Obama could have gone through a series of historical events over the past one hundred years, as if reading from a history catalogue. The Nixon Cooper story personalised a number of significant historical events that led to change. History and hope were embodied in a real person, something each of us could imagine more personally than any history lesson. Just think that this one person had lived through so many historical milestones and so many changes; and now, another historical milestone with the election of an Afro-American President of the USA.

The Nixon Cooper story also connected the theme of change from the past to the potential for positive change in the future. The Nixon Cooper story gave an historical context for Obama’s call for change, his confidence in change, and his hope that the rest of America could feel and want that change. After all, hadn’t Ann Nixon Cooper already seen tremendous change in one lifetime and seen change for the better? And if our children are still alive at the turn of the next century, Obama asks, what changes will they have seen in a hundred years in a lifetime just like that of Ann Nixon Cooper? Obama wants to initiate change and wants people to feel part of that change, participate in it, and not be afraid.

Leadership is about sharing a common purpose and direction with your people. Leadership is not just managing, as anyone who has tried to initiate change will know. We might not have the oratory skills or personality of Barack Obama in our desire to change and lead in our working lives, but the power of narrative and anecdotes to connect with people are no less important.

The speech from Barack Obama was a wonderful demonstration of the power of words and the power of storytelling to convey a powerful and meaningful message. The speech defines the leader, but the leader will still need to deliver. Obama has started his leadership journey saying all the right words.

On Cognitive Edge (2)

I have finished tidying up my notes from the Cognitive Edge accreditation course I did in Sydney last week. There was plenty to go through but I feel the notes only just scratched the surface! Dave Snowden certainly covered a lot of territory!

I have listed some key knowledge fragments from the course that I particularly liked:

• correlation is not causality
• a complex system is always different from its parts
• retrospective coherence gives us the benefit of hindsight but not the benefit of future-telling
• with complexity, one can replicate starting conditions but not outcomes
• using safe-fail in the complex domain, “go forward, probe and experiment”, because we don’t know the answer
• amplify “good” weak signals
• we use “ritual” to trigger identity (and we each have multiple identities)
• archetypes are collective representations, not caricatures
• metaphors are good for human understanding
• humans use pattern recognition intelligence; we are not an information processing machine
• any time a measure becomes a target it is no longer a measure
• and my favourite line, “cynics are people who care”, since they are the ones looking for a better way to improve their organisations (hear, hear!).

There was much more from the course, and plenty to reflect upon. I will do some more reading, thinking and writing. For now, I am chasing up some of the author references in my notes (Sutcliffe, Thom, Kaufmann, and Klein, among others).

On cognitive edge

I have been very busy of late so my blogging has suffered. I start the new financial year here a tad late, but afresh with some key insights from recent educational learnings.

Most recently, I have just completed the Cognitive Edge accreditation course with Dave Snowden in Sydney. The three days were intellectually intense and fascinating. Whilst I have seen Dave perform at a number of conferences before, and read many of Dave’s research papers and Dave’s blog (now added to my blogroll), I have a far better understanding of his work and his personality than I did before.

As an aside, whilst I don’t doubt his passion for his beloved Wales rugby side, I do doubt his judgement on their abilities! I guess we will have to wait and see how the Australians go in the rugby Tri-Nations (against New Zealand and Rugby World Cup holders, South Africa) to see if the Wallabies can show some top tier talent.

I have to complete the rewriting of my notes (they are a scrawl!) and chase up some references before making comment here about my Cognitive Edge experience. I expect to make some observations about the learning from the course next week. Suffice to say, the course was well worth the effort and the money!

On purpose and language

I want to emphasise the importance of defining and understanding purpose, as I touched upon in my blog post from yesterday. Defining and understanding purpose is critical for information architecture, communication strategies, knowledge management and communities of practice.

One of the difficulties in looking at purpose – the reason why – is from whose perspective one looks. And here, purpose is what will identify that perspective.

When designing a communication strategy, for example, you need to know your audience. Your audience is who you define to be the people you want to communicate the message to, or interact with. No good trying to communicate to vegetarians that a T-bone steak is a hearty meal! Define your target or market segment.

Sometimes the target market selects itself. When I established communities of practice at Rabobank Australia I recognised the target market very quickly from establishing a good understanding of the business and the people who worked in the business. I could see that there was enormous potential to leverage the intellectual capital of the organisation throughout its disaggregated office network and three internal organisational pillars. But now what?

In establishing communities of practice I needed to define the purpose in terms of my target market. What do they need and what would they get out of a community of practice? From the perspective of the target group (and with whom I actively communicated and participated with), it was clear that there was a need, there was a culture of support and helpfulness, and there was a strong interest in particular subject knowledge corresponding to business and client needs. The purpose was therefore to connect knowledge and knowledge needs within specific business domains through the use of communities of practice.

At the same time, I had to make sure I was using the language of my target market when discussing their knowledge and information practices and needs. The term “communities of practice” was not going to work. Instead, I used a metaphor that was easily understood and represented the social and conversational context that was at the heart of my communities.

By defining purpose and using a language the target groups could understand, the establishment and early adoption of communities of practice by a critical mass of participants meant that we were on track from the start for a successful knowledge management initiative.

Purpose should be at the heart of our knowledge management and information architecture conversations, as it should be in most things.

On what’s in a name?

You may have heard that in the high definition DVD format ”war”, Blu-ray has emerged victorious over its rival HD DVD format. In fact, HD DVD is in its death throes. Anyone left holding a HD DVD player is trying to offload them on to ebay.

The popularity of Blu-ray discs over HD DVD in Australia (and elsewhere) is substantial, despite the fact the Blu-ray format maintains the ridiculous regional coding of the movie DVD racket, yet HD DVD is regional coding free. There are other technical differences. However, for the average consumer there is little between the two high definition formats and the real issue has been a battle for the consumer mind,  much the same during the 1980s with the Beta and VHS video tape format duel back then.

In a completely unscientific manner, I surmise that Blu-ray has largely won the war over HD DVD based on the name – Blu-ray. Blu-ray is so-called because the beam of light that reads the high definition movie discs is a blue coloured ray – nothing too spectacular there. But Blu-ray sounds innovative and new. Blu-ray more easily captures an image in the mind that a two-plus-three letter acronym fails to generate. Blu-ray is 21st century.

The alternative HD DVD format, pushed by Toshiba and allies, is just another bloody acronym that competes for attention in the human brain space with all those other acronyms. For all we know, HD DVD could be an abreviation for a hard drive with a DVD player installed. In other words, there is nothing special about the name HD DVD, nor is there much else to visually associate with the name to give any impact to the actual marketing of the format. HD DVD as a name for an innovative, new consumer digital product is a dud.

The implication should now be obvious (certainly if my unscientific hypothesis is correct). Words and names really do count!

When I introduced the communities of practice at Rabobank Australia I deliberately avoided calling them by that torturous and largely unheard of name. I called my virtual communities “pubs” – a name well recognised to my target groups and symbolic of the informal, conversational spaces in which people were familiar and that I hoped to replicate in the virtual communities. Moreover, by initially marketing the communities using images of pubs (and running a competition each week in the weekly newsletter), the images gave visual recognition and support to the name “pub” and the concept behind it. I had managed to create rapid awareness and recognition for the project that encouraged the initial take-up of the communities and thereby create critical mass in a short space of time. The “pub” name for the communities spread quickly via word of mouth and this informal communication channel enhanced the spread of the message and further take-up.

Putting the effort and the thinking into selecting the right words and names to help drive home the message can really make a difference, IMHO.

On poetry

I had a coffee and a chat with Matt Moore last week and he told me about his poetry project. He has been blogging about it recently but this post is the one I want to think about today.

When I was at high school my favourite subject was English. Naturally, this education included novels, plays and poetry. However, poetry never seemed to really take off for me, although I quite liked haiku because of it’s simplicity and structure. Since then, my appreciation of poetry has improved and I have the odd book of poetry at home that I sometimes bring out in the company of a red wine. But poetry is not my naturally preferred communication style or art form.

What Matt had reminded me about poetry, however, was two things:

1) Poetry is a creative process and is therefore both innovative and personal.

2) Poetry works when there is an emotional connection (I like the line from Woody Allen’s movie, Manhattan: “the whole purpose of art is to put you in touch with feelings you never knew you had”).

In thinking about professional business writing there is a clear need to “connect” when we communicate with people. We may not have the same emotional impact as the works of Sylvia Plath or e. e. cummings, but we need to ensure that what we write has meaning for the person or people likely to read it. For example, if people come to a website to get specific information, then make that information easy to find and relevant for the specific task. Your audience wants answers quickly and efficiently – the emotional connection will come with a satisfied customer or the nurturing of the customer relationship.

Storytelling and narrative are communication methods that seek to add personal meaning and context to communication. The business narrative session I attended last year with Anecdote demonstrated how a collection of workplace stories had clear and resounding messages that might not otherwise have been captured or communicated.

Matt is clearly keeping his audience in mind by working out ways to write meaningful poetry for a person he knows nothing about. He says he has some techniques up his sleeve so we will need to watch his blog to see what is revealed.

Poetry may not be the preferred mode of communication in the business environment, but being creative and aware of the needs of your audience will help you write useful and meaningful content.

On narrative, sensemaking, and volunteering

I did promise on Saturday that my next blog post would be on narrative, sensemaking, and the volunteering project. However, Doris Lessing did come between posts with an earlier blog post this afternoon.

Looking at my notes from the debrief from the volunteering project on Friday, I took this point from Dave Snowden’s introductory remarks on complexity and sensemaking, and the wisdom of crowds: distributed cognition is all about the wider network of individuals from which the capability of finding out is greater than the individual on their own. One reason for business to seriously consider distributed cognition with people networks is the need to do more with less resources. By using networks, knowledge can be leveraged more efficiently.

Another key point related to “weak signals” – if we don’t expect something, we don’t see it. Dave showed the basketball video and I won’t steal his thunder with a link, albeit I have now seen Dave present this video three or four times now. One of the problems in looking at something is that we often overlook vital bits of information that, at the time, don’t seem relevant. The human brain actually filters out much of what we perceive in order to avoid overloading our brains with too much sensory perception.

And, it wouldn’t be a Dave Snowden talk without the mention of pattern sequencing. Humans rely on patterns developed at a young age from which the brain forms preferences related to stored experiences and information. These patterns are modified over time so that, for example, consistent patterns emerge to explain behaviours in standardised contexts. Patterns are fractal in nature from which we filter our perceptions (stereotypes are one manifestation of this). A consequence of this is entrained thinking, where our experiences and perspectives and personal learnings tend to override anything that is contrary or different. The human brain and perceptions of the environment exist as a complex landscape from which decision-making takes place. And this in turn gives us meaning.

Something that will help us is a system for the natural process of inquiry – human-pattern processes, not information processing. Information processing is too structured and more specific to time of analysis. Alternatively, narrative techniques are more useful and more relevant since they convey meaning (from the viewpoint of the person telling the story) and they relate to context. The telling of stories and the identification of meaning ascribed to them by the tellers of those stories are powerful sources of meaning, especially when aggregated. In addition, the telling of a story is a more human communication method developed over milennia whilst information processing is a 20th century phenomenon.

For more information, I recommend the Kurtz and Snowden paper on the new dynamics of strategy: sense-making in a complex and complicated world.

And the volunteering project? Well, using the sensemaking software developed by Cognitive Edge, stories are being elicited from people who volunteer or manage volunteers in the community services sector. The project hopes to capture one to two thousand stories between now and February 2008 (almost one thousand have already been collected). The aim is to discover what people believe to be the benefits and barriers of volunteering in community services so that effective policies and strategies can be put into place to help and encourage more people to take up volunteering.

The debrief on Friday was a work-in-progress and focused on the largest data set, the 17-59 year old demographic. The software powerfully showed a range of relationships but more stories are required to enhance scale and emphasise trends across all ages. One of the interesting outcomes from the survey so far has been the identification of post-graduate educated, full-time working people as the biggest group in the community services volunteering pool.

So far, contributions have come via the survey on the internet but a phone-in is scheduled for February 2008. More details later.

In conclusion, for me, the session reinforced the importance of meaning and context in understanding the complex space in which humans work and interact.

Download future_of_volunteering_overview.doc

On the internet and books

Just a quick post on this news story I read today about Nobel prize winner for literature, Doris Lessing, and her tirade against the internet.

Doris Lessing is one of my favourite novelists, The grass is singing being a particular favourite of mine. And I have a lot of respect for her views on quality literature and her reverence for the printed word in books.

However, I don’t agree that because there is a lot of junk on the internet that this is something unique to the web platform. After all, there are also plenty of junk books out there – it’s a matter of opinion. And opinion can probably see the difference between “quality literature” of the Lessing variety as distinct from, shall we say, the Mills and Boon variety of formula publishing.

Individual preferences remain paramount so we need to look at why people read what they do and why people are spending more time on the internet than reading books (this latter point being an assertion from Doris Lessing herself).

Lessing’s contention that people today know nothing of the world is arguable. I would say that the internet has enabled a far greater reach of knowledge and information than a publishing platform based on the book. Quality will vary in both domains.

I love books and I love the internet. How I determine quality and what’s right for me is certainly up to me to decide. But I can say this to you Doris, I won’t be reading any novels of literature quality on the internet. The book is still my preferred mode of reading when it comes to that!

On the fear factory

I intended to write some pithy comments about communication strategy in Australia’s federal election (voting is tomorrow) and how the spin from the current government has focused on fear, fear, and more fear. Fear the opposition Labor Party, fear the future economic tsunami, fear the immigrants, and fear the internet. Perhaps fear losing the election also has a bit to play.

But I am now sidetracked by this piece of internet fear from a report last week in The Guardian. The report is called Dork talk and it is full of fear about malicious code spreading with the same apocolyptic speed and danger as AIDS: “Don’t trust those you don’t know. Don’t have unprotected sex with someone whose status you are unsure of and don’t, don’t, don’t click on that alluring headline, that tempting YouTube link, that interesting ad, that funny-sounding birthday card or joke unless you are 100% certain of its origin”.

Now I admit I am careful about things and have harped on previously about digital identity and the digital space. I am also fully aware that there are some bad people out there in cyberworld, as indeed there are in the real world. But should fear be so pervasive?

Well, the media is full of stories telling us all about all the bad people and all the bad things happening next door and all around the planet. Ironically, all this bad news is consumed voluntarily by consumers and feeds business via advertising.

Now fear can be good if it promotes change to a less fearful position or brings about a positive outcome. Fear of the consequences of climate change should be such a tipping point (and let me add here that just the human impact from climate change will mean the potential relocation of millions of people, something the sceptics forget in their claim that the odd increase in temperature won’t mean anything more than a few more hot summer days).

What is not good about fear is “fear myasma” – the climate of fear where fear is the means used to paralyse thinking and inhibit action. Significantly though, fear more often than not leads to helplessness, apathy, and abrogating responsibility. “Let someone else deal with it”, is a common refrain.

Fear happens at the micro level as well, inside families and organisations. Fear usually is not a productive culture to live and work in. Fear inhibits trust and social relationships. Fear stifles creativity. Fear rarely instils confidence in the work one does (although I remember an interview on televison with a Russian chap who had to write speeches for Stalin. He said that fear of writing a bad speech and then being shot were powerful motivators!).

Professor Robert Dawson provides a good overview of the psychology of fear that is well worth a read. Martin Seligman is also someone with plenty to say on the debilitating state fear and depression can have on the individual. The book, Learned optimism is a classic read and I thoroughly recommend it.

How does the fear factory affect you?

On “words are powerful”

Words are a powerful communication tool if we use them wisely. This is another “isn’t this obvious” statement, surely. However, the reality is that people are often sloppy with words and use them in ways that are actually completely unhelpful.

I have almost finished Martha Beck’s book, Finding your own North Star, about finding your own authentic life’s direction. In the book, Beck wants us to make the distinction between our true selves and our social selves (the ones we use to get by through daily life, often in ways that are at odds with our true selves).

In psychology, one outcome from the conflict between our true selves and our social selves is cognitive dissonance. In order to avoid cognitive dissonance, we often rationalise alternative explanations that help reduce such conflict but this prevents us from identifying and discovering our true selves. One of Beck’s key points is about how we use words to actually disguise the real reasons and real feelings we have about certain situations. By smoothing over difficult situations using words of comfort, rationalisations, and ambiguity, we are not addressing the real causes and the real impacts on our mind and body.

Moreover, by not accurately articulating the words that describe our real state of being, it is difficult for progess to be made in overcoming problems that are seemingly intractable in our lives. In fact, we will often act in ways that will have absolutely nothing to do in addressing our problem or feelings. A classic example that I have never forgotton from my early psychology readings at university, was the displacement effect. Something made you angry, you thought about it all day but didn’t address it, and then got home and kicked the poor old dog waiting for you in the driveway – you displaced your emotional state with a physical “solution” to an innocent bystander. It happens in many situations, and it’s not always the dog who wears the brunt of it.

Founding father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, agrees that the way we use words in our self-talk and with others actually affects our physical mind and body, especially with regard to optimism and pessimism. I heard Seligman speak at a seminar early last year and have read his books. The book I like best is Learned Optimism – a book that examines the way we use words to talk to ourselves and to others and the emotional states those words create. Seligman identified the three “P’s” of explanatory style: permanent (where events are seen as permanent, and therefore unchanging, as distinct from temporary), pervasive (where the explanation is couched in terms of always being the case rather than for a particular situation), and personalised (where the explanation is attributed to an external cause or an internal cause).

Both Beck and Seligman recognise the importance of words. How we use words can actually effect our emotional states of being (and the consequent impacts), how we choose to respond or otherwise to circumstances, and how we might use words more wisely to help in breaking through to achieve positive personal outcomes.

Words and how they are used are no less vital in our professional lives as well, particularly in communication and knowledge management disciplines. Taking the time to think and articulate the message that best serves the communication need will provide more positive outcomes than not going to the effort at all. Words do have power and we need to use them accordingly.

On translating and the computer

I recently blogged about information and knowledge embedded in other languages. Single language speakers, like most English-speakers, are missing out on the opportunities to communicate and learn from other language content. My personal foreign language skills could be better, having learned German at school and French post-university. That’s one reason why I really appreciate international art and international music - my senses respond rather than relying on words.

I see that ASLIB in the UK have a conference scheduled later this year, called Translating and the computer, on 29-30 November 2007. While the call for abstracts ends on 1st July, the topic list is indicative of some of the issues the conference will address. The program from the 2006 conference gives a flavour of the topics covered last year.  The focus seems to be on the technology, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

By the way, the NSW KM Forum had a good session in Sydney last night. Matt has made his presentation available with references from his blog.

On storytelling

One of my favourite novelists was the American writer, Wallace Stegner (1909-1993). My favourite Stegner novel is Crossing to Safety, a beautiful story about an academic writer at the University of Wisconson, Madison, and the important relationships that he has throughout his life. Stegner also wrote On teaching and writing fiction, and from that work comes the following extract:

“In one sense, every word is a symbol. Letters on a page or a certain sound in the mouth convey a meaning to us: “tree” is four letters and a certain sound, but it is also a thing with bark and leaves” (page 28). Words carry both meaning as text and also as pictures.

It is therefore not surprising that storytelling has been such a powerful and prevalent communication method for such a long period of human history. Stories are expressive and sometimes their meaning requires some discovery. At the same time, stories can establish an emotional relationship that enhances the power and effectiveness of the message. Of course, politicians, marketers, advertisers, writers, poets, and movie makers have known about this for some time.

Of interest to me is the use of storytelling as a way to communicate within organisations. I will come back to this topic in later posts where I will look at some key thinkers in the field of storytelling (or narrative) as part of a communication framework. In the meantime, I recommend Stegner’s “Crossing to Safety” as a darn good read!

On words

I have been following the use of words in different contexts for some time. For example, I have been fascinated by the words used by spin doctors in politics to fabricate different meanings out of pretty damning events or behaviours. The Iraq War is a classic example. More on this in later posts.