Pedants throughout the world have been spinning around on their heads as they gasp in dizzy horror at the new buzzword: “pivot”.
Pivoting has come swirling and pirouetting into my own consciousness in myriad press releases of late. “We are pivoting our business”; “I am pivoting my focus”; “Our website has pivoted”.
Annoying doesn’t even begin to describe it. Why couldn’t they stick with the equally annoying but now accepted “paradigm shift” or some other similar inanity already subsumed into the world of buzzwordity?
Let’s begin with the origins of pivot. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, pivot was a noun introduced into English from Old French in the early 1600s. A pivot originally was, and still should be, a pin or a wheel which enables something else, connected to this pivot in a physical mechanism, to turn.
As an aside, the OED says that “penis” comes from the same withered old root as “pivot” but I’m not even going there.
Let us fast forward to the very recent (over)usage of “pivot” which it seems is now used to describe everything from a change in a state-owned enterprise’s business plan to the ballet steps of baby rhinoceroses.
On that note, the current scourge of pivoting brings to mind not so much tiny dancers turning nimbly on slippered feet as giant behemoths clumsily breaking the boards of every “platform” (another buzzword) upon which they tread heavily — but maybe that’s just me.
To be fair, a pivot, in its ancient form, was also defined less literally as “a turning point”.
As a person who believes in the natural progression of language, perhaps I should not be as angry as I am about the enormous colloquial load the modern pivot’s tiny little bearings have to bear. Because this is just the nature of language and things, is it not?
Pivoting to a new kind of tolerance and acceptance might at least lower my pedantic blood pressure.
Perhaps it is entirely right that pivot — in its metaphorical sense, meaning a turning point — should represent a volte face in the capitalist expansion of language, where any noun is up for grabs if it can render its captor a profit, and where pivot, perhaps quite rightly, stands as the turning point for nothing at all being sacred.
Perhaps I should, as one of my honorary goddaughters frequently tells me, “just get over myself”.
Pivoting to a new kind of tolerance and acceptance might at least lower my pedantic blood pressure.
But in my defence, I am not the only one who feels so outraged at the neocolonial appropriation of pivots and pivoting,
Kindred spirit and learning consultant Janette Parr recently shared my dismay in an online article in which she called pivot “the latest darling of the buzzword brigade”.
Thank you Janette. She went on to note that there are, to her mind — and I think perhaps there might be even more — seven common uses of the new “pivot” buzzword ... namely:
- re-think
- re-purpose
- minor shift
- major transformation
- complete reversal of direction
- reorganise
- (simply) change
In Janette’s words, these constitute “seven opportunities for a total mangling of meaning” — and all this is achieved by putting just one poor, innocent, defenceless word to work in a stony field for which its highbrow background left it ill-equipped.
However much I try, I cannot see the good in this. If you must make use of “pivot” in everyday speech, please make sure you are a mechanic talking about a crank shaft, or a ballerina talking about spinning around on your silken toes, or a ... well, actually, no, that’s about it.
No one else should use pivot in any sense at all. What is wrong, I ask you, with plain old “change”?
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