Don’t Touch! Lexical Electric Fence!

Curious thing, language.

If you’re an evolutionary biologist, you might see language as a piece of powerful social technology that has allowed humans to colonise the whole planet with our genes, through uniquely ingenious co-operation only possible with language. A technology that allows you to rewire other people’s thoughts with imagination, persuasion, and negotiation (or the darker-side of deception, manipulation, and sophistry).

You might join Oscar Wilde or Bertrand Russell in thinking that thinking itself is barely possible without language: that language “is the parent and not the child of thought” (Wilde); or that language: “serves not only to express thoughts, but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.” (Russell)

If you’re George Orwell, you might say: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

If you’re you, you’ll definitely have noticed the talent for tribalism with language: the jargon, acronyms, and portmanteau words that are there to keep you out; beyond the lexical electric fence.

Sometimes, putting up a lexical electric fence to keep people out is intentional and rational, to hide, or to protect yourself. Think of the criminalisation of love, before homosexuality was legalised in 1967: before then, Polari was nearly a whole language of its own, magpied from naval, Italian, cockney rhyming slang, Yiddish, and the traditions of music halls and theatres; used by the gay community to talk to one another without the police listening-in. A low-tech, but no less effective, encrypted messaging service.

Sometimes, it’s the linguistic equivalent of hiding from the law, or a society you don’t agree with, or your parents (!): think of drug dealers, or street slang, or hip-hop, or every generation of young people ever. 

Sometimes it evolves from a need to share a common glossary, like medical terms for various illnesses, or legal definitions: which introduces an element of comedy because if you need to define everything, even the simple things can sound absurd! Have you ever had synchronous diaphragmatic flutter (hiccups); or horripilation (goose bumps…from the Latin portmanteau for ‘hair stand on end’); or veisalgia (built from the Norwegian for ‘uneasiness after debauchery’ and Latin for pain…a hangover!)

Sometimes, lexical electric fences seem to appear unintentionally. But they still hurt enough to keep people out.  

Maybe they’re the fences we need to cut?

At the Curiosity Society, we have our own pair of sturdy wire-cutters to snip any lexical electric fences that keep people out for no good reason.

Maybe a couple of examples will help explain…

Whenever we’re working with organisations in the social economy, a meeting often comes along which has money on the agenda. Typically, the aim is to have a conversation about the P&L (lexical electric fence warning! that’s profit-&-loss account) and the Balance Sheet of the organisation.

We’ve noticed that those meetings are sometimes inhabited by people who tell us finance isn’t their thing, or who tell us they have pathological levels of imposter syndrome, or who want to abdicate their responsibility for finance by staying silent and letting the finance folks do all the talking.  

This is not a surprise. The clue is in the name not-for-profit: if your purpose is people not profit, it shouldn’t be a surprise that finance isn’t part of the furniture. However…when we get asked to de-mystify money, we’ve noticed more people get involved in the conversation, and better decisions get made.

The financially familiar is always our starting point. Got a current account? Then you already understand profit-&-loss! Regular income and expenditure in your personal life is your doppelganger P&L. Got a savings account? Then you already understand a balance sheet! A rainy-day fund that grows when its sunny (your regular income is above your expenditure) and shrinks when it rains (and vice versa).

Snip. No more shocks from the lexical electric fence.

It's the same but different with social investment…

Social investment is only in its early 20’s and, like every young generation ever, it is trying not to be like its parents (the economy, and civil society), but define itself with its own language.

When it comes to figuring-out who, what and how much to invest, social investors typically ask questions about (lexical electric fence warning!): governance, impact, business model, financial projections and systems.

We have fun decoding these with stories: imagine someone you’ve only just met asks you to lend them £500. You’re going to have some questions, right? The questions you might have are:

o   ‘Who are you’? (that’s the doppelgänger governance question…who are the people who run the organisation asking for investment?);

o   ‘What are you going to do with the money’? (that’s the facsimile impact question…is the organisation going to do something valuable with my money; something that I agree with?); and

o   ‘How and when will I get my money back’? (that’s a clone of the questions about business model, financial projections and systems…does the organisation have a believable plan about how it will make some money, when it will make some money, and how it will know about both).

Snip. No more shocks.

What we’d prefer, is to throw away our wire cutters because there weren’t any fences to snip.

Or as Albert Einstein might have said: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Your move, social investment.