Yesterday I began my morning with a meeting involving members of various departments who are dealing with a major change to our IT systems. We are replacing a system from Vendor A with another from Vendor B, and just about everything changes. As a result, we have a lot of meetings. But I didn’t bring this up to get sympathy. Everyone has pain in their lives, and mine is not particularly more impressive than yours.
But in yesterday’s meeting, we got to to a discussion of terminology. You see, Vendor B sold us a system that uses different names for a wide number of of our data fields, and we needed to agree on the names we would use in our reporting systems. Should we use the new vendor’s names, use the ones we had traditionally used, or some combination of the two? Now, at this point I’m sure you’re thinking “Gosh, that sounds like fun.
I wish I could have been in that meeting!”
But what got me thinking was when one of the IT folks said “That is just semantics. I don’t care what you call them.” This statement was so profoundly wrong that I nearly admired it for the awesome scope of its wrongness. The first level of wrongness comes when you consider that all of us at this particular site, in all of the different departments, need to talk to each other. And that means we all need to understand what we are talking about. I wondered if this IT person had ever heard the term “naming convention”, and if so, did he comprehend why that was important.
Then I got to thinking about that phrase “It’s just semantics.” This is where the real problem lies, I realized. It is a common phrase, and usually used to imply that the meaning of the words is not important to understanding the issues at stake. In this colloquial sense it says that people sometimes use weasel words to avoid a truth. For example, a politician trying to explain away an embarrassing situation, like Clinton saying “I did not have sex with that woman.” We correctly see that people who do this are misusing language to confuse the situation.
But saying that this is semantics is profoundly wrong. What is really happening when people use this phrase is that they are saying that words and their meanings do not matter. And when you go down that road you have a serious problem. I doubt you can even think intelligently if you cannot use words with a certain degree of precision. And communication becomes pretty much impossible if we cannot use words and agree what we mean by them. That is what semantics is really about. So if someone accuses me of using semantics, I thank them for the complement. What they have said is that I care about what I say and try to use the best words to convey the meaning I have in mind. Of course, they don’t realize that is what they said.
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