But, the "clincher", if you will, the phrase that just screams out for attention is...

The adjective refers to anything suggestive of Kafka, especially his nightmarish type of narration.

"Kafka"...

The descriptions were familiar...ALL TOO FAMILIAR.

But, "Kafka"?

Whassup with that???

When in doubt, look it up in the dictionary...right?

As luck would have it...a picture. You know...how the better editions of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary pepper their pages with illustrations to break up the monotony of page after page of words?

Here is what I found in my edition:

Main Entry: Kaf·ka·esque Pronunciation: \ˌkäf-kə-ˈesk, ˌkaf-\ Function: adjective Date: 1946 : of, relating to, or suggestive of Franz Kafka or his writings; especially : having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality (Kafkaesque bureaucratic delays)

Ah ha!

Not Kafka...Swopes.

Not Kafkaesque..."Swopesesque"!

Need I say more...

(Actually, without too much surprise, more cattiness follows the article.)

Mind
How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect

By BENEDICT CAREY

In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.

An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”

At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.

Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.

“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”

Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams.

In a series of new papers, Dr. Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.

When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.

“There’s more research to be done on the theory,” said Michael Inzlicht, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, because it may be that nervousness, not a search for meaning, leads to heightened vigilance. But he added that the new theory was “plausible, and it certainly affirms my own meaning system; I think they’re onto something.”

In the most recent paper, published last month, Dr. Proulx and Dr. Heine described having 20 college students read an absurd short story based on “The Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka. The doctor of the title has to make a house call on a boy with a terrible toothache. He makes the journey and finds that the boy has no teeth at all. The horses who have pulled his carriage begin to act up; the boy’s family becomes annoyed; then the doctor discovers the boy has teeth after all. And so on. The story is urgent, vivid and nonsensical — Kafkaesque.

After the story, the students studied a series of 45 strings of 6 to 9 letters, like “X, M, X, R, T, V.” They later took a test on the letter strings, choosing those they thought they had seen before from a list of 60 such strings. In fact the letters were related, in a very subtle way, with some more likely to appear before or after others.

The test is a standard measure of what researchers call implicit learning: knowledge gained without awareness. The students had no idea what patterns their brain was sensing or how well they were performing.

But perform they did. They chose about 30 percent more of the letter strings, and were almost twice as accurate in their choices, than a comparison group of 20 students who had read a different short story, a coherent one.

“The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others,” Dr. Heine said. “And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”

Brain-imaging studies of people evaluating anomalies, or working out unsettling dilemmas, show that activity in an area called the anterior cingulate cortex spikes significantly. The more activation is recorded, the greater the motivation or ability to seek and correct errors in the real world, a recent study suggests. “The idea that we may be able to increase that motivation,” said Dr. Inzlicht, a co-author, “is very much worth investigating.”

Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.

Still, the new research supports what many experimental artists, habitual travelers and other novel seekers have always insisted: at least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking.

Actually, another article caught my attention a while back. I was waiting patiently for just the right moment to "utilize" it. To my surprise, our "Kafka Representative" went silent...no new "missive" did he pen.

So, I shall use this opportunity...an enrichment exercise, if you will.

Enjoy...

PS: I'll leave it to our forced-to-be-creative CATS to name our own resident version of "Fancy Nancy".

Plain language key to better communication

Whether writing company memos, facilitating the monthly staff meeting or composing a media release, using plain language and straightforward writing is a must. Copyblogger, a blog for online writers, makes this case well in a recent post by Sonia Simone. Simone compares writers who use big and/or complicated words and phrases to the children’s literary character, Fancy Nancy who always aims to make things more “sophisticated” and out of the ordinary than they are (e.g. she reads “tomes” rather than “books”). Simone points out that this quality can be charming in a 7-year-old but is not effective for a communicator. Many business leaders and communicators fall into the Fancy Nancy trap.

It’s tough to sell this idea to some. Doesn’t it sound more intellectual to use the word “utilize” rather than “use”? Doesn’t that insider-business-speak give the impression that we know what we’re talking about (e.g. “We need to leverage our vertical markets as part of industry best practice). Why should we dumb down what we’re trying to say?

Plain language isn’t ‘dumb’ language

It’s actually more difficult to write using simple, clear language than it is to use jargon and “fancy” words. The goal of writing, or speaking, is to deliver a message. Yet business writing often fails to be clear. You may think that corporate-speak is making your speech or writing more inspiring or credible-sounding but it’s actually leaving your message open to interpretation. People may be very unclear about what you’re trying to say but will rarely tell you for fear they will look stupid. It also has a way of making people tune out because all of the “thinking outside of the box” catch phrases sound like tired hype.

The path to clear writing

A quick Google search for “plain language” will point you to many resources, but here are some quick tips.

1. Review for clear language after the first draft – Sentence by sentence, check to see if you’ve used the simplest language possible. Exchange flowery, multi-syllable words for straight forward ones. (e.g. use about instead of approximately, most instead of preponderance, tone down instead of modulate).

2. Cut down on words per sentence – Readers can get lost in long sentences so break long sentences into two if you can. Also get rid of unnecessary words (e.g. Replace phrases such as, that being said with but or the fact he did not succeed with his failure).

3. Get rid of jargon – Every industry has jargon and it’s very difficult to do away with it entirely. However, if you can use a non-jargon word easily, do it. This is particularly important if you are writing for an outside audience.

4. Avoid hype – If your product really is “ground breaking” or “cutting edge” you don’t have to tell people that, they will know it by your description. If it’s not really that great, declaring that it is won’t make it so and will just make people roll their eyes.

5. Stop overused phrases – Stay away from trendy catch phrases such as, “world-class”, “shifting paradigms”, “mission critical”. These types of phrases have become so overused they’ve become meaningless. People tune them out. Describe what you mean and ditch these credibility suckers.

6. Have someone else read it – Get someone you trust will tell the truth to review your document. Have the person circle anything that isn’t clear upon a first read through.

There are oodles of blog posts about the issue of clear writing and folks seem to love commenting on their pet peeves, banished buzz words etc. If we talk about it enough, maybe one day, everyone will be a plain language writer.