OPINION28 September 2009

If I become unhinged it’s the Boston Globe’s fault

Someone pointed out this article from the Boston Globe’s The Word column in which Jan Freeman dismisses a complaint from Mr G. B., similar to mine, that people are using the word issue more often than before.

As a follow up to my post on how we’ve replaced problems with issues, someone pointed out this article from the Boston Globe’s The Word column – a sort of Talk Normal with education that people pay to read on Sundays – in which Jan Freeman dismisses a complaint from Mr G. B., similar to mine, that people are using the word issue more often than before.

She says:

“Mr. B. is a victim of the Frequency Illusion, to use the term coined by linguist Arnold Zwicky. He’s listening for issues, so he hears the word often, and imagines that it’s everywhere. In fact, in the specific usage he objects to – having issues instead of having problems – the problems version is still way, way ahead of issues.” Her evidence: she did a Google search for each term. On this basis she dismisses the idea that we might be uncomfortable describing problems honestly.

You’re wrong, Jan Freeman! I know they don’t pay much for columns these days, but an analysis that took more than 30 seconds on a search engine would have showed this is probably not a Zwickian illusion at all. Which makes her snobby putdown that “Mr. B.’s analysis is more puzzling than his failure to check the facts,” doubly unfortunate.

Her conclusion: “…issues aren’t always problems; they are also anxieties, conflicts, and disagreements. And if the word is meant to make those conflicts sound less dire, isn’t that a good thing? After all, anyone who’d rather have problems than issues is welcome to them.”

On the first point, I agree. There are lots of things that really are issues. On the second, absolutely not. I’d rather have been an astronaut than a journalist but, if I started turning up for interviews in a space suit, people might point out that I wasn’t facing up to the reality of my situation. It’s the same thing: when we can’t utter the word “problem” at work, we’re living a fantasy.

Tim Phillips

@RESEARCH LIVE

3 Comments

Grant Barrett

15 years ago

Please explain how you'd use a search engine to prove this. I don't know of a search engine whose results are tagged or dated accurately enough in order to come up with a sufficiently large and balanced corpus of diachronic text that would generate reliable ratio of the use of this "issue" per million words. Inability to correctly identify the use of "issue" in question and to account for duplicate results alone are enough to eliminate every search engine I can think of. There are other tools for this, but your commentary doesn't read as if you've consulted them.

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Grant Barrett

15 years ago

One of the free tools which isn't overly awful at this sort of thing--and certainly better than a raw Google search--is Google Insights. By looking for one of the most common collocates of the "issues" in question, which is "major issue(s)" we can see that the trend for use of those phrases all told is downward over the few years in which Google has recorded data. It's a relative search, too, not a gross count. http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=%22serious%20issue%22%2C%22serious%20issues%22%2C%22complex%20issue%22%2C%22complex%20issues%22%2C%22major%20issue%22&cmpt=q Take "major issue" out of the search to see how the less common terms also show a downward relative slide. You can also gather more reliable data using this corpus: http://www.americancorpus.org/ There you'll also see that the highly collocated "major issue" also trends downward from 1990 to 2009.

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Rob

15 years ago

I once had a job in tech support for a camera maker, where we were encouraged not to use 'negative words' like 'can't', 'doesn't' or 'problem', on the idiotic basis that these words gave the wrong impression and made customers feel bad. But it's a bit tricky to avoid them when you're talking to a customer who CAN'T turn their camera on because it DOESN'T work. If they've just parted with £200 for it and it's their daughter's first birthday today, this can safely be classed as a PROBLEM. Given that Jan Freeman writes for a living, I'm surprised that she's willing to go along with the daft idea that we should choose words to make this nasty old world seem nicer. Firstly, the fact that a word describes something negative does not mean it is in itself something negative upon which we should try to improve. I don't like problems, just as I don't like war, or cholera, or mushrooms, but I'm not going to stop talking about them when the subject arises. Secondly, as Freeman acknowledges, 'issue' is not the same as 'problem' (or anxiety, or conflict). These nuances are what allow us to express what we mean. If we give in and use the bland, safe word that everyone else is using, we've lost something. For a journalist not to grasp that is pretty worrying.

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