Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Is impact impacting your impact?

The impact of changes to the use of impact has been profound on KillGobbledy.

Tears have been shed, teeth have been gnashed.

It was a beautiful word. Powerful, almost onomatopoeic. The 'im's low slow build to the crescendo of 'pact', packs a certain punch.

A great word
There it was sitting quite happily for years. As a noun it was content.

It was proud to be associated with great people, great deeds, great ideas and moments that had an impact on the world. It stood alongside the best and worst of humanity, a word of force attached to greatness.

It was comfortable describing collisions or impingement. It even had some fun with our wisdom teeth where it came to mean, 'ouch' and 'how much'?

The slippery slope
Occasionally, in the pursuit of action, it dabbled in the world of verbs. Building on noun foundations (noundations?), it drove or pressed closely or firmly into something.

Sadly, it never reached the heady, breathless language of romance. How much richer our love stories could have been. 'Darling, may I impact you?For tomorrow I may die'.


Theft
And then, the theft occurred. This noble word was stolen, ripped from our lexicon, battered and shoved into every meaningless Powerpoint slide that's ever been vomited onto a screen.

Sales were having an impact on revenues, revenues on synergies, synergies on bottom lines and bottom lines on top-lines. Suddenly impact was losing its impact and becoming just another piece of static in the white noise of corporate drivel.

Worse was to come.


Transition
It became transitive, then intransitive and the fall from grace was complete.  Now anyone or anything can impact anyone or anything and impact has lost its impact.

An innocent word corrupted by a cruel world.

Can it recover? Or has the overuse of impact impacted on impact irrevocably.

KG

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