Managers Going too Far: Targeting Linguistic Over-Reaches

The practice of using words beyond their contexts such that the words’ meanings are tortured and yet are pretended not to be was a trend in modern America during the 2010’s. The business manager instigated the trend in order to “gild the lily,” which means to claim more than is warranted or merited. Astonishingly, people dismissed or perhaps even didn’t recognize such over-reaches. Perhaps as long as people have used language, egos gripped in the pursuit of gain have presumed that keeping to a word’s extant meanings in a language is somehow optional.

To be sure, the malleability of words is one way in which a language changes in order to incorporate societal changes.  “I’ll text you tomorrow,” for instance, uses the noun text as a verb. Similarly, “I’ll email you later today.” These two verbifications did a lot to bring the English language up to date in the twenty-first century. Such adaptations are natural rather than pushed from an agenda.

A motive from an agenda pushes through, insisting that a word can be used all of a sudden in another context in which the meaning does not apply. In other words, the agenda reverberates from the sheer over-intensity of the insistence, or declaration, even above objections that are correct. Once a manager of a Target retail store insisted to me that the shoppers are guests rather than mere customers. Her tone was so forceful I could hear aggression in it. That manager was like arrogance on stilts during a flood; her claim should have been underwater.

Gilding the lily even more, some of those guests are members. It was strange indeed to be asked by a cashier, “Are you a member?” “Of what,” I would naturally wonder, as clubs had members and Target was not a club because it had customers who were not members (and even the members didn’t have to pay dues!). In short, the company was going too far in insisting that its customers be called guests and members, as if the company were a house or club, respectively. When I have guests over and I give them gifts, I don’t charge them for it. In no sense is a customer a guest, especially considering how bad customer service can be. To find an employee referring to a customer as a guest and yet treating the person very badly demonstrates a real disconnect within the employee’s mind, and yet this has been common even since customers “became” (as if naturally) guests and members. Nothing had changed on the store end in terms of customer service, so insisting that customers are to be called guests and members was to pretend that the commercial relationship was something more than it really is. It is this something more that points to the underlying motive: trying to get something more by pretending something that really is not the case. Wanting to pretend that the customer is something better, rather than that word somehow had been sullied and thus naturally to be jettisoned, was the motive. Telling customers that they are guests rather than customers would reflect instead on the company’s arrogance and being in a state of denial.
As another example of going too far in order to claim more than is warranted, Target also designated its retail-area heads as area owners. So, one employee is the owner of the home furnishings, for instance. In a corporation, the stockholders own the corporate wealth collectively. To bestow the title of owner onto an employee simply because he or she is in charge of a given area of the store implies that the employee’s authority is more than it really is. In the process, the meaning of the word owner is violated without even an acknowledgement. Again, a state of denial plays the mental function of protecting the over-reach such that even the over-reach is not recognized as such. It is almost like the managers were living in fantasy lands governed by the simple rule: if changing a word’s meaning helps the business, then make the change and pretend that no such change was made. .