When I was in management development, I often devised games and exercises for workshop groups to reinforce learning points. One of these involved giving out randomly to each participant a word on a card – everyone had a different word. They then mingled in an open space, showing their cards to each other, trying to answer my challenge: Can you sort these words into two distinct sets? I gave them a couple of minutes for this exercise. At the end of it, they had to stand back-to-back in two rows – each row displaying a distinct set of words. Each group had to explain to me what was distinctive about their chosen set.
The number of words varied according to how many were attending the workshop, but here is a typical list. Can you sort them into two distinct sets?
first
top
challenge
month
freedom
great
sixteen
rich
unanimous
happiness
never
excellence
Have you managed to sort them out? No? Well the workshop delegates found it difficult too, so I gave them a little clue on the cards I gave out. The words did not look like they do above – they looked more like this. Does this help?
first
top
challenge
month
freedom
great
sixteen
rich
unanimous
happiness
never
excellence
You’ve probably guessed by now that the clue lies in the typography. Ignore the colours – they’re just a red herring (or yellow or green herring) – look instead at the two different fonts used. Excuse the non-PC language, but what we have here are lean words and fat words. You should now be able to sort out the two distinct sets as follows:
first
top
month
sixteen
unanimous
never
are the lean words. Here are the fat words:
challenge
freedom
great
rich
happiness
excellence
At one level, you could see this exercise as one in lateral thinking or perception - ‘thinking outside the box’ - as the players can work out the answer by looking at the visual form rather than the meaning of the words; but the learning point goes much beyond that, because there is a clear distinction in meaning as well as look between the two sets of words, and their respective leanness or fatness is semantic as well as visual.
Look again at the lean words. I call them lean because they are spare in definition. Each of them is specific, concrete, unambiguous, pared down to one meaning. Each of these words can be measured to prove its claim to be what it is.
This can’t be said of the fat words. They are fat because they have several layers of meaning. They are abstract, non-specfic, ambiguous words, difficult to pin down, impossible to measure.
The lean words are the words of the scientist, the precisionist, the objective reporter. There is no wriggle room in them, unlike the fat words, which are the words beloved of politicians. Using them you can avoid being pinned down. But there is another reason why politicians, along with campaigners, coaches and evangelists often turn to fat words; precisely because they can be interpreted in different ways by speakers and listeners, they can be used to motivate, to inspire wishes, hopes and dreams. There is more resonance in fat words than in the dull, proasic lean words.
Listen, for example, to Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech, and note the immense number of fat words employed.
It is important to remember, however, that fat words can equally be used to evade, deceive and influence for malign purposes.
This distinction between lean words and fat words is an important one for any writer of non-fiction or fiction, of reports or speeches, of stories and plays – as important as the thickness of paint on a brush is for the visual artist. It is a key distinction, part of the thoughtful writer’s lexicon of choice.
No comments:
Post a Comment