'Optics' + 'Metrics' - Military speak pt.2

'Optic' nerve

Political-speak takes a techie turn

By Jan Freeman

May 18, 2008

PSST, SAID A friend, have you heard? Optics is the new metrics.

She wasn't talking about the science of light and sight, but the latest word in political jargon: Optics as a synonym for appearance, how a situation will look to the public eye.

Andrea Mitchell, for instance, said recently on "Hardball" that Barack Obama was "already concerned . . . about the optics" of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright before their recent split.

Metric, as a fancy word for yardstick or benchmark, is more familiar; it had its big moment a few years ago, when Donald Rumsfeld, that rhetorically innovative secretary of defense, kept searching for the "metrics" by which we might measure progress (or the lack of it) in Iraq.

But it wasn't new corporate jargon when he brought it to the "war on terror." The Oxford English Dictionary dates metric, meaning "system of measurement," to 1934, as a term of art in psychology.

Optics, in its new sense, looks to be more recent than metrics, though it's not an easy term to search. It turned up in a 1987 wire story quoting Howard Baker, President Reagan's chief of staff, on Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega's visit to Fidel Castro: "If he were an American politician, his advisers would be telling him they don't like the optics of it."

Objections to it date back at least nine years, to a post on the American Dialect Society listserv denouncing optics as "the new PRspeak currently bandied about by D.C. techwonks." A current political website calls it an "annoying trendy word for this election."

And yet, optics hasn't really made much headway in the lower 48; it's Canadians who've taken the usage to their hearts. Search Google News and you'll get plenty of examples, but almost all are datelined Toronto or Montreal or Winnipeg.

I can't guess why our northern neighbors would be early adopters of optics, but the word's appeal seems plain enough. It invokes a whole set of tech-and-science terms like physics, statistics, and tectonics, as well as Greek-derived high-concept nouns like hermeneutics, aesthetics, and pragmatics, all with an aura of brainy precision.

The only odd thing about the new optic is that its point of view has switched; optics used to be a property of the visual instrument, but now they belong to the lookee. If that mild weirdness didn't bother Canadians, though, it's not likely to slow down the spread of optics in this country. Look for it in a political analysis near you.

Source: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/18/optic_nerve/