Driving home today I fell in behind a pickup truck with an odd homemade bumper sticker.\u00a0Composed of individual stick-on letters, it read:<\/p>\n
drafting is not an act its an art winston salem cars are not apart<\/strong><\/p>\n Was he trying to say something about tailgating?\u00a0 Probably, but what?\u00a0 Never mind the missing apostrophe, the words didn’t make sense.<\/p>\n It made me think of those execu-speak vision statements you see on office walls: “Committed people advantaging our Clients interest’s,” that sort of thing. God knows, when corporate bigwigs display their ignorance of English, wise underlings check their tongues and pretend the words make sense. Politically savvy underlings make<\/em> the words\u00a0make sense by advantaging everything they can get their hands on.<\/p>\n The US Air Force has its own blue-suited corporate leaders, of course, and consequently its own execu-words.\u00a0 In my day, “having visibility over”\u00a0projects and\u00a0processes was the rage.<\/p>\n No, I don’t know the origin of the phrase, but am willing to bet it started with a three- or four-star general.\u00a0 Like this: the higher-ranking general told a lower-ranking general\u00a0he wanted visibility over some project the lower-ranking general’s division was working on, meaning that he wanted to enhance his ability to micro-manage the project by knowing everything that was going on as it was going on.\u00a0 The lower-ranking general, in turn,\u00a0demanded visibility over the project from his colonels; the colonels demanded it from the majors; suddenly everyone was saying “visibilize me.”\u00a0 Unit vision and strategy statements were rewritten to embrace visibility in all its forms,\u00a0downward, upward, and lateral.\u00a0 Two years later visibility was suddenly replaced by transparency, and down came all the posters.<\/p>\n During visibility’s heyday I refused to use the word in any sense other than the meterological.\u00a0 Execu-speak made my skin crawl, but I was no fool and\u00a0kept my thoughts to myself.\u00a0 I confess that I’m a little ashamed of myself for that.<\/p>\n Today, of course, I no longer have to be political.\u00a0 The guy in the pickup truck was no boss of mine . . . I should have tailgated the illiterate son of a bitch all the way home, then rear-ended him for good measure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Driving home today I fell in behind a pickup truck with an odd homemade bumper sticker.\u00a0Composed of individual stick-on letters, it read: drafting is not an act its an art winston salem cars are not apart Was he trying to say something about tailgating?\u00a0 Probably, but what?\u00a0 Never mind the missing apostrophe, the words didn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,14,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-military","category-words"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=354"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11880,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354\/revisions\/11880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}