“Abstraction is the enemy of clarity” from the Guardian on euphemistic management language hat tip to Johnny Moore, via FB … and modelling abstraction, taken to the generic limit … hat tip to Margaret Warren also on FB, from Geek and Poke:
The Guardian piece is actually pretty good, balanced. Metaphors do die, the best ones always do eventually, but they remain valuable if the visual image remains meaningful. That’s quite different from such metaphors becoming clichés through frequent use in ever less relevant circumstances, or part of an abstraction to say less specifically about the particular circumstance – the latter often associated with the accurate (generically true) but less specifically helpful, often politically-correct, bet-hedging, minimum-committal, euphemistic use of management terminology.
The title is neat too. “The figure of speech isn’t dead.” A figure of speech Quine.