Recognising Psychobabble

Subject: Recognising Psychobabble
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 25 Apr 06 - 09:19 PM

I was reading another thread about "attitude", and it set me thinking about all the other psychobabble expressions which set my teeth in edge.

So I thought rather than drift that thread I'd start one specifically about that - a listings thread to start with, maybe it might turn into a discussion about what is actually meant by the expression, and why some people loathe this way of talking, and others seem to value it highly.

So:

Attitude problem
Quality time
Closure
Meaningful relationship

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Peace
Date: 25 Apr 06 - 09:29 PM

Celebrate the differences
Self-empowerment
Hot (as in s/he is hot (meaning attractive))

I'm posting because this is still above the line.

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Joe Offer
Date: 25 Apr 06 - 09:41 PM

"Thank you for not pissing on my floor."

-Joe, moving it below the line-

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: ragdall
Date: 25 Apr 06 - 09:44 PM

I feel invalidated.

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Little Hawk
Date: 25 Apr 06 - 09:52 PM

"Quality time" is the one that really makes me feel ill. I was going out with a great girl once, and she mentioned one day that she was going to be spending some "quality time" with her Mum, who hadn't seen her in some time. She mentioned it several times. Somehow, the "magic" began to fade for me from that moment forward... ;-D

I will also kick something if I hear about "closure" again from anyone.

I know what it's like to feel "invalidated", ragdoll! Oh! The pain! But is it as bad as feeling "violated"? Or how about "sullied"?

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Peace
Date: 25 Apr 06 - 10:07 PM

Thanks in advance.

(It's still above the line.)

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Little Hawk
Date: 25 Apr 06 - 10:10 PM

Don't thank me until you've opened the package, okay?

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: dianavan
Date: 25 Apr 06 - 10:11 PM

consultation, co-operation and collaboration.

These terms are used by people who want it their way but wish to appear to be 'fair'.

I also hate the word accountability. It always means more useless paperwork.

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Peace
Date: 25 Apr 06 - 10:34 PM

Also, 'policy'. Policy just means no one has to think. "It's corporate policy."

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Amos
Date: 25 Apr 06 - 10:56 PM

All these words have realmeanings -- they just get pirated by lazy thinkers to do work for them they don't want to confront.

Policy: general guidelines on how people in a group will handle situations. Perverted definition: an excuse to give you crappy service.

Closure: A feeling of completion which brings relief to one who has attention held onto something not finished. For example, if you send a letter revealing deep feelings, and the person hasn't answered yet, no closure until th e big question mark is resolved. Similarly if you have has a fighting relationship with a parent for thirty years, but somehow the two of you finally get to communicate and settle the issues between you, you both feel that relationship has reached a completion point and experience closure. Perverted definition: used to make you do something you don't want to even start, let alone finish!

Quality time is shorthand for time two people spend being with each other and enhoying each other's company, sharing thoughts and experiencing their mutual friendship. It is used in sharp distinction to helter-skelter business time, or having to get things done in a rush so all communications have to be chopped short. Perfectly legitimate distinction. Perverted use: Used as an excuse for very low-quality time by promising quality time later; used as a substitute for the actual article by taking about "quality time".

All relationships are meaningful -- the problem is some people give them very skimpy meanings! : D


A

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: M.Ted
Date: 25 Apr 06 - 11:02 PM

Kevin, this concept really resonates with me, and if we can get some more validation, we can use the synergy to create a new paradign, which I see it as a definite win-win situation---

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Janie
Date: 25 Apr 06 - 11:05 PM

Well said, Amos.

Janie

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Little Hawk
Date: 25 Apr 06 - 11:18 PM

Oh, YEAH, M.Ted! I, for one, am deeply gratified to hear such a proactive statement as you just made. ;-)

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Little Hawk
Date: 25 Apr 06 - 11:23 PM

So...do we have a consensus on that?

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: katlaughing
Date: 25 Apr 06 - 11:30 PM

How much collateral damage will there be, though?

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Little Hawk
Date: 25 Apr 06 - 11:35 PM

And how much of it will be internalized?

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Ebbie
Date: 25 Apr 06 - 11:37 PM

Thanks for putting it in words, Amos! Smooth, easy phrase or not, the feeling it supposedly connotes is a valid one. (And that resonates with me. :>)

If I can judge others by my own experience, when we use a word or phrase like that it is usually because we are searching for a true description of what we are feeling or planning.

I don't tend to say "quality time" but I know what I'd mean by it if I did use it. I would mean a period of time when our attention was attuned to each other, i.e., we didn't go shopping or bowling or whatever; maybe we didn't even make music together. To me it means a time of connection, of being in the moment- another phrase that is over-used and therefore suspect.

I do use 'resonate', only because to me it describes a feeling that is internalized, a feeling that is almost physical, a 'knowing' that is true and deep and honest.

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Janie
Date: 25 Apr 06 - 11:37 PM

Not much, if we can marginalize the suckers.

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: katlaughing
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 12:00 AM

Actually, me, too, Ebbie. I use those terms but in a way that means something to me and the person to whom I am speaking. I think there's a lot to be said for "validation," too, and I don't mean a parking lot charge!:-)

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: michaelr
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 02:00 AM

Thanks, Amos. Let's reclaim the words.

It seems to me that "psychobabble" is a term that's used to say "I can't be bothered to try to understand your point of view". (Without saying so.)

Cheers,
Michael

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Little Hawk
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 02:28 AM

It all depends how people say the words, and what kind of meaning they put behind them when they say them. I do have trouble with "quality time", though, for some reason. ;-) Maybe I just starting hearing it used way too much.

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: autolycus
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 03:02 AM

It also depends on how the words are heard.

They might be said honestly, and if the listener is sufficiently cynical, easily annoyed or superficial, the honesty of the expression can be dissolved.

As Amos says so well, any language can be devalued by misuse, commercial use, flippant use, thus fostering the avove listener characteristics.

I think one of the things going on here is that there are many people who go to therapy or, more likely counselling, and come away only with the husk of a vocabulary, having missed the kernel. They then use the words superficially, and others pick up on the emptiness.

On the other hand, to a cynic, anything can be reduced to meaninglessness. So, for example, the great game of chess becomes just pushing bits of wood around a black and white board. Chess is thus emptied of meaning.


   Ivor

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: katlaughing
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 03:06 AM

come away only with the husk of a vocabulary, having missed the kernel

beautifully put, ivor. Thanks,
kat

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 03:57 AM

Most of the words quoted are management speak, which is something like social worker speak, aka circumlocution; saying something unpleasant in a different way to make it sound more acceptable to the listener/reader.
I think that attitude problem or bad attitude predates most of the examples quoted, and is derived from a genuine problem.
Most of these expressions have their genesis in the PC and equal opportunities industry. They are awkward sounding, mainly because they are usually trying to impose an unnatural doctrine on an unwilling recipient.
Giok

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: GUEST,JTS
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 08:08 AM

What I don't like are words that are cliched putdowns disguised as intelligent or witty thought.

"Psychobabble", "Doublespeak", or "liberal" as used by "ideological" conservatives. While the words were probably discriptive and meaningful in their first use, their usefulness quickly errodes as they are applied to every possible situation.

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: GUEST,TIA
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 08:41 AM

"I think we've all arrived at a very special place. Spiritually, ecumenically, grammatically."





Capt. Jack Sparrow

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: MMario
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 08:48 AM

disrespect - used as a verb.

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 08:55 AM

Usually rendered as 'dis' which is even worse, and usually more sinister too.
G..

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: GUEST,TIA
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 09:10 AM

I hate it when people use "the carrot and stick" analogy, and get it wrong. The carrot is indeed a lure, but the stick is used to hold the carrot out in front of the donkey, NOT to hit the donkey from behind! Newspeople and politicians get this wrong all the time. My head explodes.

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: M.Ted
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 09:34 AM

Giok is on to something meaningful here--and I think he is right. Most of these words are used to mean the opposite of what they seem to mean--When people say they are going to spend some "quality time" with someone, it really means that they have been neglecting them--"validation" is used to indicated that something has been disregarded --People usually propose using a "carrot and stick" approach to conceal the fact that they haven't done anything to support or encourage the subject at all--

As to "psychobabble", excluding this discussion, when you hear it, it is the usually the speaker who is babbling like a psycho--

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Wolfgang
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 09:47 AM

Rapport, energy flow, anal retentive, homophobe,...

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Amos
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 09:48 AM

I think psychobabble is a useful expression, as well -- because when terms like these and others -- "relationship" and "self-relaization" for example -- are used without a sense of the context and depth of their original meaning, they become a sort of babble which is difficult to relate to. On the other hands there are similar abuses in any field where understanding is replaced by BS. There is religio-babble, or spiritubabble, there is technobabble, and probably cuisinibabble, autobabble, marine-babble, and god knows, literababble.
Art babble is so common that it turns people into hard-boiled pragmatists just to listen to it! LOL

A

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: heric
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 09:49 AM

Is this it?:

"Not self-identity identity itself equivocally, not the dark itself equivocally, in "self-alienation," not "self-identity, itself in self-alienation" "released" in and by "otherness," and "actual other," "itself," not the abysmal inversion of the light, the reality of the darkness equivocally, absolute identity equivocally predicated of the self/selfhood equivocally predicated of the dark (the reality of this darkness the other-self-covering of identity which is the identification person-self)."

Leahy, G., Foundation: Matter the Body Itself.

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: GUEST,jts
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 09:55 AM

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/carrot.html

"Carrot on a stick" vs. "the carrot or the stick."

The Usenet Newsgroup alt.usage.english has debated this expression several times, most recently in spring 1998. No one there presented definitive evidence, but dictionaries agree that the proper expression is "the carrot or the stick".

One person on the Web mentions an old "Little Rascals" short in which an animal was tempted to forward motion by a carrot dangling from a stick. I think the image is much older than that, going back to old magazine cartoons (certainly older than the animated cartoons referred to by correspondents on alt.usage.english); but I'll bet that the cartoon idea stemmed from loose association with the original phrase "the carrot or the stick" rather than the other way around. An odd variant is the claim broadcast on National Public Radio March 21, 1999 that one Zebediah Smith originated this technique of motivating stubborn animals. This is almost certainly an urban legend.

Note that the people who argue for "carrot on a stick" never cite any documentable early use of the supposed "correct" expression. For the record, here's what the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary has to say on the subject: "carrot, sb. Add: 1. a. fig. [With allusion to the proverbial method of tempting a donkey to move by dangling a carrot before it.] An enticement, a promised or expected reward; freq. contrasted with "stick" (=punishment) as the alternative."

[Skipping references to uses as early as 1895 which refer only to the carrot so don't clear up the issue.]

"1948 Economist 11 Dec. 957/2 The material shrinking of rewards and lightening of penalties, the whittling away of stick and carrot. [Too bad the Economist's writer switched the order in the second part of this example, but the distinction is clear.]

"1954 J. A. C. Brown Social Psychol. of Industry i. 15 The tacit implication that . . .most men . . . are . . . solely motivated by fear or greed (a motive now described as "the carrot or the stick").

"1963 Listener 21 Feb. 321/2 Once Gomulka had thrown away the stick of collectivization, he was compelled to rely on the carrot of a price system favourable to the peasant."

The debate has been confused from time to time by imagining one stick from which the carrot is dangled and another kept in reserve as a whip; but I imagine that the original image in the minds of those who developed this expression was a donkey or mule laden with cargo rather than being ridden, with its master alternately holding a carrot in front of the animal's nose (by hand, not on a stick) and threatening it with a switch. Two sticks are too many to make for a neat expression.

For me, the clincher is that no one actually cites the form of the "original expression." In what imaginable context would it possibly be witty or memorable to say that someone or something had been motivated by a carrot on a stick? Why not an apple on a stick, or a bag of oats? Boring, right? Not something likely to pass into popular usage.

This saying belongs to the same general family as "you can draw more flies with honey than with vinegar." It is never used except when such contrast is implied.

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: GUEST,Mrr
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 10:05 AM

Thank you for sharing.

Catharsis.

Positive / negative feedback.

positive / negative reinforcement - reinforcement at all, for that matter.

I guess what gets to me is the difference between the meanings of jargon terms within the scientific jargon and in plain English, where it always ends up meaning something that is NOT what it meant in the original jargon. My problem is that I know the jargon...

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: bobad
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 10:14 AM

I feel your pain.

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Ebbie
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 10:16 AM

"He flied out."

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: GUEST,TIA
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 10:21 AM

From the Word Detective:

[...the earliest (1916) citation for the phrase listed by the OED seems to refer to a carrot dangling from a stick attached to and moving forward with the donkey itself: "The spectacle of an otherwise intellectual individual engaged in trying to plumb the depths of duplicity to which dealers can descend in faking old furniture is like that of the donkey pressing eagerly forward after the dangling carrot. It would ... be very pleasant to possess the carrot of complete knowledge, but the conditions render it impossible."

My guess is that the "perpetual motion" sense of the phrase was the original, probably inspired by a fanciful cartoon (real donkeys, unlike voters, are not stupid enough to fall for such a trick for very long). But the world being what it is, the "reward and punishment" meaning took over rather rapidly, and is thus the one heard most often today.]


There, I think we have made a lot of progress today. How does the group feel about that?

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: kendall
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 10:21 AM

State of the art.
Pushing the envelope
The cutting edge.
BOLLOX

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: GUEST,JTS
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 10:28 AM

I think "Carrot and Stick" means one thing, "Carrot or Stick" the other. When I was in Business school the case you are talking about was simply called "rewards", where Carrot or Stick was used to describe alternating rewards and punishments.

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 10:32 AM

Catharsis is a good old Greek word and even in the psychological manifestation it is still being used in almost its true and original form, one of those rarities that actually means what it says even in the fashionable world of psycho analysis.
Purge...whether the body or the mind is involved.
Giok

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Amos
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 10:37 AM

HEric's quote is the most egregious piece of awful writing I have ever encountered. It presumes referents for things which have no referent, and pretends to map territory which does not exist, leaving the reader in a tail-spin of multi-dimensional meaninglessness.

That is the purest of psychobabble.

"State of the art" is a commonly used term in patent processes.

"Pushing the envelope" was very meaningful in its original context which was high-speed (faster than sound) flight.

When a meaningful expression is stolen and turned into a "buzzword", used for excitation instead of communication, babble ensues.

A

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: GUEST,TIA
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 10:53 AM

generate your own babble automatically here.

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: M.Ted
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 10:57 AM

You say "In what imaginable context would it possibly be witty or memorable to say that someone or something had been motivated by a carrot on a stick?" --carrots are funny--apples and oats are not funny. Everyone knows that.

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: GUEST,JTS
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 11:13 AM

Of course Bugs Bunny is famous for the "Carrot and the Schtick".

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Becca72
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 11:20 AM

I have a friend who is in a constant state of therapy...she hasn't moved forward in 20 years. Keeps bringing up needing "closure" for things that happened in high school (16 years ago) that hurt her "self-esteem"...I say, MOVE THE F### ON with your life. The closure for such an issue is called graduation. What "closure" means to me most of the time is "I want the last word". Well, in real life you don't always get the last word. Deal with it.

Also, not psychobabble, but a word I'm getting sick of hearing is "literally"...not because I don't like the word, but because it seems very few people know what it means. I actually heard someone say "it scared me so bad I literally jumped out of my skin". Now THAT I'd love to see.

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Peace
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 11:28 AM

At this point in time . . . .

The thread is still above the line.

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: GUEST,JTS
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 11:32 AM

Peace,

Your line must be broke, literally.

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Peace
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 11:40 AM

Not at this point in time. Isn't this thread so fun?

Subject: RE: Recognising Psychobabble
From: Charmion
Date: 26 Apr 06 - 11:46 AM

My office cubicle is next to the "human resources" (speaking of babble) cell, and I invest a great deal of effort every day in blocking their utterances from my awareness. The section head (known as Foghorn for her resonant and forceful voice) has replaced her entire vocabulary with psychobabble, and one of these days I'm going to record her -- just for giggles. My tongue has a permanent dent in the tip where I keep it firmly clamped between my teeth to prevent myself from screeching at her that the idea behind language is communication, not obfuscation.