The heavy footprint of the ‘footprint’ buzzword

Pick up most any newspaper these days, and chances are that before you put it down you will have encountered at least one instance where the buzzword “footprint” has been used to describe a surface area covered by something.

As in, “The city engineer said the footprint of the proposed casino could exceed Environmental Protection Agency guidelines.” Or, “Police were able to identify the vehicle by the wide footprint of its tires.”

All of a sudden it’s “footprint” this, “footprint” that, and “footprint” something else at nearly every turn. It’s as though the bureaucracy just discovered the word and demands its money’s worth before the craze peters out. If there is a more aggravating and overworked noun in the English language at the moment, I can’t imagine what it might be.

As the reigning word-fad, “footprint” rivals the highly contagious catchphrase “at this point in time” that flourished during President Nixon’s administration, as Nixon’s minions tried mightily to convince the American public – unsuccessfully, as it turned out – that their guy was not a crook who should be sent packing.

Essentially, Nixon got the boot for being up to his eyeballs in the Watergate sleaze, but an even greater justification for sending the man into exile, it seems to me, would have been his role in popularizing the “point-in-time” redundancy.

My dictionary defines “buzzword” as “an important-sounding, usually technical word or phrase, often of little meaning, used chiefly to impress laymen.” I’m not sure how technical the “footprint” affliction is or how much it might impress your average layman. Or even why the chap would want to be called a layman, for that matter.

But the phenomenon serves as a good example to illustrate that we humans are a predictable lot when it comes to latching on to such fashionable expressions. With us, it’s largely monkey-see, monkey-do in such matters as we strive to keep up linguistically with the Joneses.

Let the so-called experts consistently throw around a few “ongoing review mechanisms” or “parallel third-generation contingencies” and if we are not on guard we could wind up as copycats spouting the same sort of gibberish.

The contagion can spread into related areas of communication, as well. Like when the national news media caves in on its responsibility for attribution in its news stories, opting to let faceless sources who often have hidden agendas say pretty much what they please, anonymously.

The national news magazines and the wire services will hang a damning quotation on “a State Department source who did not want to be identified as being critical of her boss,” for example, and before you can say “trial balloon,” some minor bureaucrat back in Hooterville is demanding identical treatment by the local press.

Not long thereafter, an alert citizenry may notice that the unnamed-source abomination has infiltrated the news coverage of city hall in their local newspaper and on local radio and television. Sources who are “not authorized to speak on the record” or who “did not wish to be identified discussing sensitive issues” begin cropping up with regularity, and for the news media there can be no turning back from this slippery slope to anonymously sourced hell.

But you didn’t read it here. Since I am not authorized to speak on the record about such sensitive matters, I must insist on anonymity. And anyway, we are gathered here this morning not to plow that tired old ground once again, but to ponder the electorate’s propensity for glomming on to the buzzword du jour and flogging it to death before abandoning it for something sexier.

In the interest of speeding up the abandonment process for “footprint” while simultaneously shilling for a replacement in the pantheon of overworked descriptions, I turned to my treasured copy of “How To Talk Yankee,” compiled by the late Gerald Lewis and first published by Thorndike Press as a guide for “tourists, migrants and summer complaints.”

I figure if I were to whale away at the task I might successfully introduce into mainstream lingo for their allotted 15 minutes of fame such Yankee-isms as “slimpsy” for poor quality, “lift” meaning to strike with the fist, and “nooning” for lunch break. But, like Lewis, I expect I’d have trouble rendering in print the proper Down East pronunciation of a number of words such as “stone” and “boat” that contain the long “o” sound.

“Attempts at phonetical spellings cannot help here; you’ll just have to practice by yourself. You’ll be trying to get ‘stone’ somewhere between ‘stoon’ with a short ‘oo’ and ‘stoo-un,'” Lewis counseled in a pronunciation primer for the letter O. “It’s hahd.”

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may contact him via e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.