Everything Else

I was reading BBC News Online last week (I see it when I sleep now) and a serious news story used the phrase “playing catch up”. This got me thinking, where did this actually originate? I can remember in the late 80s coming home from school and “Going for Gold” would be on BBC, and Henry Kelly (above) would constantly say “Hans you’re playing catch-up” or “Patrick you’re playing catch-up”, with the bland European feel of the show making it some kind of EU wet dream.

Thing is, I don’t really think this stupid phrase was invented by Henry Kelly on “Going For Gold”, but I’d love to know when it first began to be used. I can’t say I’m a big fan.

If you Google “hard working band”, it’s no surprise that two of the first 10 results are Irish. We are a Catholic country, and it’s a Catholic meme.

Don’t you dislike it though? Personally I can’t stand this romantic idea of “the hard working band” or “the hard working artist”. Firstly, it is not actually “hard work” to be in a band. Not relatively. If anyone thinks so, try being a nurse, or a doctor, or cleaning toilets, or driving buses, or flipping burgers. What job do you do? Maybe you’re there right now. I’d wager whatever it is, it’s probably harder than being in a band.

Now don’t get me wrong, a band on the up may indeed be working hard, just as anyone who is trying to succeed at their career is. Indeed many bands or artists may rehearse a great deal and put in a lot of work. In fact, every band probably does. That’s why it’s irrelevant.  If a band or artist doesn’t give you a creative output you enjoy, then who cares how hard they work? You don’t hear hard work when you press play, nor should you.

The reality is that for a band or artist to really move us, they must create something we love or feel strongly about. That creative process does not necessarily include any “work” whatsoever. It may do, but it’s not a key component. I mean, if Paul McCartney had decided to add a long rapidfire guitar solo to “Yesterday” it may have been harder work, but would it actually have made the record sound better?

Creativity is what matters. Ideas are what matter. Work is just the realisation of both. Can we end this fetish once and for all?

“ATTENTION BUDDING PHOTOGRAPHERS/DIRECTORS/JOURNALISTS/MEMBERS OF SOCIETY”

Am I the only one who hates the use of the word “budding” in this context? Perhaps not, yet it’s ubiquitous!

In fact “budding” is seldom if ever used in any other sentence. And it’s always preceded by “attention” or “calling all”. Why not just say “Do you want to be a photographer?” Or “Do you want to be a painter?” Or “Attention Photographers”. Or if you really want youth, say “Attention Young Photographers”. All of these are less annoying and less clichéd.

Can anyone find me a common use for the word “budding” outside of this? (Oh look the picture above has one, not so common though) I mean, excluding its actual use in relation to trees? I can’t think of any. From now on whenever you see this word used in this way you must furiously attack the mother or father hen that has used it. Or else just seethe silently. The choice is yours, budding pedants.

PS: I am reading this for the last few weeks, but I promise that “budding” has annoyed since long before I started.

Football is full of clichés. Even the parodies of its clichés are clichéd themselves. But some of its well worn phrases are more interesting than others.

During England’s game with Estonia at the weekend, once it became apparent England were cruising to another efficient victory, I heard BBC’s John Motson say something like “it really looks as though Steve McLaren has managed to maintain the feelgood factor here today”.

This is one of these quite common phrases with a fairly mysterious origin. I mean, can anyone remember the first time they heard it used? It really has the ring of the self-help class or management training day about it, doesn’t it? Google shows 95,000 results for “feel good factor”. Unsurprisingly, football articles pop up over and over again.

From the Guardian: Feelgood factor could see German clubs revive in Europe

From the BBC: McLeish revels in “feelgood factor”.

It seems to be a particularly popular phrase in Scotland.

From the Scotsman: An article about Christmas

From the Scotsman again: Springboks out to rekindle “feelgood factor” of 1995

Hat-trick for the Scotsman, clearly a paper enjoying a real “feelgood factor” when it comes to using “the feelgood factor”: Driver says “feelgood factor” has returned to Tynecastle

Then there are the non sporting uses, well, a few of them.

From “Toy News Mag”: An opinion piece telling toymakers and their elves to stop criticising China’s toys lest they damage the entire industry. (Proof if you needed it that there are millions of battles being fought all over the world simultaneously about the minutiae of things you’ve never given a second thought to. )

An Empirical Study of “the feelgood factor” in paired programming-This isn’t as complicated as it sounds, but unfortunately it is as boring.

And so on and so forth, up to 95,000. It makes you wonder though doesn’t it? Where has this term come from?

What’s great about the spread of an odd term like this is the way it subsequently becomes squashed into all sorts of sentences, and mixed into metaphors. So for example we can “rekindle” a “feelgood factor”, “maintain” a “feelgood factor”, “foster” a “feelgood factor”, “instill” a “feelgood factor”. But what does doing any of these things even mean? What is the “feelgood factor”? Can anyone tell me? It seems meaninglessness is a key part of the term “the feel good factor”. Afterall, if we knew what factor this was, we could do the maths with it easily.

It’s like a term that exists solely because it describes something intangible and inexplicable. It seems to say “things are going well in this team/industry and people are happy about it, but we have no real idea why”. As ever with a cliché, the more its used the more it catches on.

And interestingly, it seems to describe the brief successful periods of English sporting teams really well. So often they’re beleaguered and put upon by the media and their own supporters. Perhaps they perform well so rarely that when they do commentators must speak with delight of this mysterious “feelgood factor”, knowing all too well that it’s about as likely to hang around as a feather in a hurricane. It’s almost as if “the feelgood factor” blows in every now and again, they win a few games, then it blows away and nobody knows why.

I mean, you wouldn’t hear Brazilian commentators talking about a “feelgood factor”, would you? When they play well it’s their default, not some fragile temporary voodoo.

As for uses outside football, could it be an economic term perhaps? It seems like it can be applied to the housing market or the economy quite well, perhaps at times of high spending or growth. Can anyone confirm?

Field of Dreams was shit right? Well, as far as I remember. A man builds a baseball field in his garden to attract the ghosts of dead baseball players. Repeat that to yourself. That was the plot. Now I can’t tell if, isolated from the film, that sounds like it should be great or absolutely woeful. Nor can I remember if it was a particularly big hit, Wikipedia tells me it was nominated for a few Oscars though, and it grossed 64 million at the box office (whatever that means, film buffs, help me).

But after using the phrase “if you build it, they will come” at the weekend quite automatically I then was forced to contemplate what a recurrent movie line it is. Of course, plenty of lines from films are repeated ad nauseam, but few in so many different contexts so divorced from the films themselves.

If you’re dubious, just take a look at the different ways in which “Field of Dreams” most famous line has been used and re-used, taken from 372,000 Google search results for the term.

If You Build It, They Will Come: “What Teddy Roosevelt knew a hundred years ago still holds true in today’s Panama.”

If You Build It, They Will Come: “Building learning communities through threaded discussions.”

If You Build It, They Will Come: “Google sees big boost in Mobile traffic.”

If You Build It, They Will Come: “Need to attract overseas students to boost the coffers? An international student centre may be just the thing.”

If You Build It, They Will Come: “Rumsfeld’s baby nukes and the War on Terror.”

If You Build It, They Will Come: “An article about “Jews In Green”, a site for Jewish soldiers.”

Then there are the wiseguys who decide they must screw with the classic formula of “if you build it, they will come”:

If You Build It They Will Come…But How Will They Use It (A not so exciting piece on Multimedia Learning Environments

If You Build It, They Will Come…In Their Cars (New York City parking policy)

If You Build It, They Will Come…and Spam (Online marketing)

And so on, and so on, until all you can hear is that voice whispering from the cornfield, except it’s wearing a suit and working for a web design company, or writing for the Guardian, or talking about the US presidential election 3 years ago.

What’s interesting is that in the film, the line was, as far as I can tell, supposed to mean something akin to “carpe diem”, to suggest you should follow your dreams and simply trust your instinct and your gut to lead you to them. And this meaning seems to be, loosely, the one that has survived in a lot of the above links. But given the breadth of the types of argument or article that employ it, it seems clear that the phrase also fits a variety of purposes. Is its popularity proportionate with the popularity of the film? I suggest not. Why then is it so popular?

In trying to answer that it’s interesting to wonder whether it’s a triumph of language or a triumph of meaning (or indeed, whether it’s a triumph at all for a phrase from a film to reappear in new contexts in such a weird way, and not just dumb luck). That is to say, is it used because it is a nicely rhythmic phrase in itself, or is it used because it is in fact perfectly vague and evocative? It’s almost a less is more thing, in this case, less substance results in more usage!

Can anyone reading think of another way to say “if you build it, they will come”? A way to communicate the idea of the phrase as simply and nicely? I can’t really, and this is what’s interesting about it, it’s like the movies pre-empted business with this useful cliché. It’s not unusual for movie quotes to become hugely popular or memorable, but the versatility through blandness of “if you build it, they will come” certainly is a little unusual. I mean, judging by the Google search results, almost every time people use the phrase, they AREN’T talking about the film.

To illustrate, search for Scarface’s “Say hello to my little friend”. You get just 250,000 results, and most are movie sites or t-shirt merchants. With “if you build it, they will come”, as shown above, there are a variety of articles, reports, blog posts, business advice sites, and arguments. Okay, so there’s a common thread of sorts, a whole heap of internet marketing and business/entrepreneurial sites come up, but even these are nothing to do with the movie. It’s weird. Like the Ronseal ad, whoever wrote the film must laugh everytime they see their monster rear its head.

In conclusion perhaps I should add in the following warning from the Sydney Morning Herald. Just in case some of you decide to build a baseball field in your back yard that is. It’s obviously not the world’s most optimistic paper, as this dreary caveat shows: “You can’t work on the assumption that if you build it, they will come”. I can’t?? I can’t rely on the most famous line from a Kevin Costner film to steer my livelihood? But 350,000 other websites told me I could! Then the sucker punch: “In fact, if you don’t do the right thing, THEY might stay away in droves”.

“If you build it…..they might stay away in droves” is not the moneyshot in “Field of Dreams”, it’s that of “Field of Misguided Assumptions” or “Field of Repressed Failures” or “Overgrown Ditch of Procrastination”. None of these would have been very successful, would they?

PS: Before anyone points it out, I should mention that yes, I realise I am smoking the crack pipe in a big way on this blog.