Andrew Ferguson’s recent evisceration of focus groups, another of the fine frauds of our day, is but the opening shot in a war I believe we must wage to the bitter end — a war on the word “focus” itself.
The word has been driving me bonkers and beyond. I see it every morning all over my New York Times, where political candidates inevitably need to ” focus” their campaigns; social programs require “focusing”; and U.S. foreign policy, now that the Cold War is long over, must be — ah, but you will have anticipated me — re-focused. This very morning’s Times carries two fine focus-filled headlines: “Stars Focus Their Power, and the Issue Is Abortion” and “Dying Zapatista Leader Is Focus of Only Accord So Far.”
Searching for relief, I pick up the New Yorker, where I discover even so stalwart a critic as Arlene Croce, apropos of the directors of the Pacific Northwest Ballet, writing: “One of the ways they did not deviate [from Balanchine] was in their focus on female talent.” They’re doing it in London, too, for in the current week’s Times Literary Supplement I read that ” One of the great merits of Tadie’s biography [of Proust] is the way he brings into focus an image of the young Proust as a formidably curious and active person. . . .
Not only in the press is everyone focusing away like mad, but athletes, too, are all asquint, trying to obtain a focus. “The main thing,” says Michael Jordan, more times than I care to recall, “is to stay focused.” I would argue, contra Michael, that nowadays the main thing is to say “focused.”
The other day I sat in a meeting with a group of successful and intelligent businessmen. We were there to discuss the future of an institution, of which we are all trustees. Had I a dime for every time the word “focus” came up, I could have paid to fly first-class to this meeting instead of the usual steerage. These guys who, unlike me, have met plenty of payrolls and are, in Henry James’s phrase, “seamed all over with the scars of the marketplace” appeared to be certain that what our institution needed was to establish its focus, perhaps narrow its focus, or maybe widen its focus, but, once focused, to keep its focus, yeah brother, amen. I looked down at the notes I took during the meeting, which read: focus-off, go focus yourself, and take a flying focus.
What is it about the propensity of certain inelegant words to catch on and spread like an upwind California forest fire? The word “impact” had a run of this kind ten or so years ago. Such good old words as “influence” and “effect” were given early retirement, and suddenly everything had an “impact” upon everything else. Then the damn word was converted to a participle, and all things began “impacting” upon every other thing. Then it appeared as a noun, so that things had “impacts” all over the joint. Thus far focus hasn’t yet been turned into “focusization,” though give it time. Academics have taken to using the hideous plural, “foci,” as in “The foci of this paper are three.” Foci, for anyone who reads with his ear as well as with his eye, as Robert Frost claimed the best readers do, has all the intrinsic beauty of the word ” pinkeye.”
Certain words don’t just catch on for no reason. They catch on because people feel good saying them. People like to say they are “intrigued” all the time because it makes them sound intriguing. For a time they liked to say ” special person,” I suppose because it made them seem rather special themselves in being able to discern specialhess in others. (Today, of course, one cannot buy a non-satirical greeting card without the word “special” in it; and “special” itself has become a Hallmark word.)
People must also like to say “at this point in time” — which was first brought to us by John Dean and the Watergate crew — because it so felicitously conveys a false precision. People are very hot for the word ” process,” from peace process on down, and my guess is they feel it makes them subtle thinkers, able to capture the flow and delicate dynamics of political and social change. What, really, could be more intriguing than focusing on the impact of so special a process as watching a language fall apart, at least at this point in time? Few freakin’ things.
So let’s return the word “focus” to ophthalmology and optics, whence it derives. If you are a heavy user of the word yourself and don’t know what you would do without it, may I recommend replacing focus with such solid older words as “concentrate” and “emphasize”? I think you’ll find they work well — swell, even. Just relax, stop focusing, kick back, and blur out.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
