Did everyone else see this article in Businessweek? Pretty interesting stuff, even if you are tired of being constantly reminded that a trip to the movies might cost more than the movie ticket itself. What caught my eye most of all is a quote in the second paragraph, right below the rather annoying banner ad. If you don’t remember, I’ll repeat it here:
What the country needs is “a national strategy,” Bush said. “And the most important component of our strategy is to recognize the transformational power of technology.
The words we choose betray our mindset. Or rather, they reveal our mindset. Catch that? Transformational. What the President wants to say is simple. Technology can bring about massive change. Certainly. Of course, it can. Yet his choice of terms is incredibly telling.
Transformational. Do a Google search on that word alone. You’ll see links to prayers, self-hypnosis, self-helps and other life affirming sources. And we learn more when we add “-ist” as a suffix, as in Transformationalism or Transformational Christianity.
His other options? Transformative. Transforming. Neither of these have the same religious overtones as transformational, though transformative does tend to surface in discussions of clairvoyance and psychic phenomena. Transformative has even been used to describe the President himself, though I believe a more apt word for that particular article would be divisive or possibly polarizing.
It would be easy to brush his choices aside, to think of it in the same light we offer an actor who misses a cue or ad libs an unsure line, but this President is nothing if not consistently “on message.” Whether he manufactures his own terms or is prompted professionally, very little drops from his lips without careful consideration of audience, mood and intention.
