Developments are inevitable
I have been out in cyberspace again, trying to find meanings for some of the expressions I get stuck on.
I wasn’t going to; I was going to give up. Then an old friend emailed me about my blog. She’s an editor too and she confessed that she doesn’t understand the words either. So I’m not the only one, I thought.
The only way to be happy, she advised me, is to “just check the spelling”. May be she’s right, I thought. She seems to be happy. But then I read on – she confessed more. She has worked for E&Y and said:
“I hope you’re not trying to edit something I originally wrote for them!”
I imagined her laughing as she said it, tossing her mane of dark hair. So, I thought. At what price happiness? Have those others got her under some spell, in their power? Has she gone over to the side of conspirators who are secretly laughing at editorial staff everywhere? The ones who invent expressions like ‘improvement levers’ and ‘technology imperative’?
I was at a low ebb. Perhaps I am all alone in this world of corporate speak. And if they’ve got my friend, how long before they get me?
I have to crack their code, understand their ways, know my enemy.
So I started by googling ‘technology imperative’. Many books have been written about this but it would take me some time to read them all.
Then I discovered this webpage, and I understood the words. It was written by some bloke at Aberystwyth University – an academic, but it’s still reasonably clear. It turns out a ‘technology imperative’ is actually a ‘technological imperative’, and it’s about technological developments being inevitable.
I was very excited. So it does mean something after all.