This piece was originally published on the ineffable SpeakUp. Mr. Vit elected to cut the E-Prime preamble; the unedited version is here in full.

I decided, recently, to have a go at excising the word “just” from my vocabulary. Not in the adjectival usage (“just” as in “justice”) nor in the noun (“just” as in “a large-bellied pot with handles”, according to the OED) but as an adverb. Oh, you know, I’ll just write this article on language minutia and graphic design. That’s what I mean. I use it all the time, in that casually dismissive sense. So do most of my peers and contemporaries; it’s almost as common as the plague of “likes” with which my generation is constantly upsetting our more grammar-conscious elders.

I’m not worried about offending them, though, or anyone else. By eliminating the dismissive adverbial form of “just” from my vocabulary, I’m trying to hack my own brain.

In 1965, a linguist named D. David Bourland, Jr, proposed the idea of E-Prime. E-Prime was put forth as a modified version of the English language that basically eliminated the verb ‘to be’. You couldn’t say “I’m tired” in E-Prime, for example. You’d have to say something like “I feel tired” or “I’m constantly closing my eyes because of a dearth of sleep” or somesuch. The fundamental assertion of E-Prime is that, by forcing yourself to have to jump through this absurd linguistic hoop, you have to carefully choose your words. As such, the sentences you come up with are supposedly less ambiguous. Is a rose red? I suppose I don’t know. I do know, however, that a rose appears red to me.

E-Prime has had its share of criticism from prominent linguists, but the idea remains enticing. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, a pivotal linguistic idea, says that there is an inherent and immutable relationship between the grammar of the language a person speaks, and the nature of that persons’ thoughts. This idea is generally accepted as true, although people still bicker about how exactly it works. Walter Ong wrote extensively about written language as a technology that structures the consciousness of those who utilize it in Orality and Literacy. The idea also permeates popular fiction, particularly science-fiction: consider Newspeak, the abbreviated form of English proposed by Orwell in 1984. Many of Borges’ short stories also employ bizarre theoretical languages, into which behavior and ethics have been tellingly encoded.

These are fascinating object lessons in the interplay of form and content, really, but they’re of little practical use. Even E-Prime, with its enticing simplicity, is more of a mindfuck than anything else; once you find yourself rephrasing “You’re disgusting” as “I seem disgusted by you”, you realize that the mental overhead of ablating to be from your speech may not be worth it.

But a simpler challenge, I believe, can yield potent results. Perhaps “just” isn’t the symptom of a problematic institutionalized dismissiveness, but the cause (as some takes on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis suggest).

On the surface, this seems to be somewhat true. If you say “I just have to design these four posters, and just work out the type treatment for the whole series” to yourself out loud, your eye-rolling is somehow implicit. You just have to do these things; they’re not even worthy of discussion, really. But the same sentence without the “just” sounds far more monumental: “I have to design four posters, and work out the type treatment for the whole series.” That sounds like a far more serious endeavor to me.

The reason this is particularly important to me, a graphic designer, is that this inherently dismissive attitude can short-circuit the iterative processes that we use to make things awesome. For the purposes of this essay, I would define awesomeness as a state characterized by a rich holistic intertwining of style, content, and meaning. An awesome graphic work is the sort that you might stare at for a few tense moments, upon first seeing it, before quietly uttering “fuck yeah!” under your breath.

Consider, for example, 2x4’s entry in the Urban Forest Project’s poster contest. The buttons on this page that allow visitors to download the poster or order a totebag printed with it are laughable, as the poster is a blank white sheet of nothing. Ostensibly, this poster is “about the space between the trees”. Is this cute in a snarky, in-joke sort of way? Perhaps. Is it awesome? I would say no.

There are many posters on the Alan Dye and Petter Ringbom. These are awesome, as are many others. Some of the less complex posters are no less awesome; consider the entries by David Reinfurt or Nikki Chung.

I would consider some of the entries that fall back on default modes to be generally less awesome. Whether the default mode in question is unique to the designer’s house style (see Paula Scher’s) or specific to the means of graphic production (see COMA’s), these posters invariably end up as one-liners. You read or see them, and that’s it, you’re done.

But the 2x4 example epitomizes anti-awesomeness in the most thorough fashion. It is, I would submit, the ultimate product of the mentality fostered by the overuse of “just”. You can readily imagine the smirk on the author’s face when he or she decided to send in a blank PDF file, knowing full well that their authority as an agent of a highly regarded design firm would guarantee the blind acceptance of their imbecilic pun into the projects’ pantheon.

I don’t mean to single out the Urban Forest Project, but the fact that it collects such a wide range of designer-authors under one aegis makes it an ideal context in which to compare awesomeness, and test for the evidence of “just” default-mode thinking. If you’re familiar enough with a given aesthetic, you can spot the “just” stuff easily, in any portfolio. Experimental Jetset, the Amsterdam-based design collective, has practically made a career of “just” employing default typefaces, monotonous color palettes, and other such deadpan decisions.

I want to point out at this point that “just” design is not necessarily bad design, and awesome design is not necessarily good. Awesomeness can suck you in, but the design in question must hang together as a whole, or it will lose you, and the awesomeness will have been wasted. And sometimes the “just” move is the right move, as the signature type treatments of iconic artists like Jenny Holzer and Barbra Kruger indicate. In these cases, the simplistic repetition of the default type style in question becomes synonymous with the persona of the artist, and so encapsulates their message. (In design, we call this “branding.”)

I propose that there is a perfect fulcrum between the opposing forces of absolute “just” and absolute awesomeness. At this point, the rote application of a default approach is harmoniously tempered by the rigors and context-dependant overtures that characterize awesomeness. Artists and designers who have reached this magic singularity in their practices can be said to have a ™.

A fine example of a ™ practitioner is M/M Paris, the French design studio chaired by Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustniak. M/M Paris’ aesthetic is highly distinctive and contiguous throughout their work, but they completely eschew the bog-standard default styles, having created their own sort of “just” approach using the methodology of awesomeness. Many of their posters contain hand-drawn type, and the letterforms themselves often have line weights, contrast values, and other parameters that are notably common to many of M/M Paris’ works. But in each case, these letterforms are manifest for their given context, and their given context only.

We can refer to this hybridized approach as M/M Paris™. It is a systematic default style that can be applied in a veneer, but a veneer that can only be concocted (and summarily decocted) by M/M Paris themselves, as only they retain the distinct strains of awesome that are essential for the styles’ formulation.

Many of the established upper echelons of graphic designs’ canon are ™ practitioners. The likes of Ogilvy™, Landor™, Wieden+Kennedy™, Pentagram™, Vignelli Associates™, and their ilk, continue to land lucrative contracts. They have the same appeal to their clients as does a company like Ford™, or Charles Schwab™, or Maytag™… the breath and scope of their respective histories have achieved the critical mass necessary to sustain their ™ equilibrium. Likewise, relatively younger independent entities such as Fons Hickmann™, Tomato™, Aesthetic Apparatus™, Graphic Thought Facility™, Harmen Liemburg™, et cetera, all are nimble enough to maintain the trappings of ™ness at small sizes.

At both ends of the spectrum, their work is both serially recognizable and utterly distinctive. It is important to note, however, that these luminaries™, as well as their up-and-coming subordinates™ with less name-brand recognition, have all historically been delivered to the nirvana of the ™ state through paths lined with hard-earned awesomeness. The dichotomy of “just” and awesome is an inequitable one, and the spiraling gravitic arms surrounding the ™ state only spin in one direction.

This is the primary reason I want to purge the actual word “just” from my speech. As Orwell postulated, if I can’t think it, I can’t do it. And so it will go. This act will constitute but a tiny fraction of the journey down Awesome Street, but it’s high time I got going. I just have to fix my brain first, and I’ll be right there.

David Sokol is the acting news editor at Architectural Record, and has written for ID magazine, Metropolis, and others. This article will appear in the forthcoming Public Relations, RISD architecture’s new annual.

Let me tell you a secret. I don’t drink the Kool-Aid known as archi-babble. Really, you care. As an editor and writer, I scout for emerging architects and new designs to publish. And I may pass you by if you’re more prattle than substance.

But this point is so well trodden that I’ve asked the gods to send me a press release, a media kit, something, that states my case better than I could articulate it myself.

Et voila, without tactlessly naming names, here’s an invitation for the final performances of a site-specific work. Let’s choose a few opening excerpts about the artist: “…She challenges the traditional notion of facade as constituting a membrane that simultaneously separates and erotically joins the inside with the outside.”

Neat. Our subject will one-up Vito Acconci by pleasuring herself in a doorjamb, or straddling a windowsill, in full public view.

“Her live performances reflect the tension between art and architecture as a conflict between what is aesthetically pleasing (the seduction of surfaces, facades or the face itself) and the realization that our experience of space is circumscribed and curtailed by the very structures we inhabit.”

Um, all right, perhaps she’s masturbating some Bulthaup cabinets while wearing a prison uniform. Perhaps a copy of Discipline and Punish sits on the counter, representing the shade of Foucault as he blithely takes in the scene.

Well, it turns out that our subject will be strapped in a metal chair, with varying instruments prodding, pulling, and stretching her face into a series of excruciating contortions. What this has to do with our premise, I quote: “The face is rendered empty like an architectural element open to interaction and dialog. At the same time, it also appears immobile [sic] a grimace, a mask. Surprisingly, the fusion of mobile and immobile elements causes the architecture of the face to move and facial expressions to dissolve.” I’ll rephrase my question. WTF?

While our subject is an artist, her esoteric lexicon and garbled-masquerading-as-intellectual syntax has infiltrated architecture. Could the democratization of design have inspired such pretension — that the profession is resorting to fancy language to place itself above the Wallpaper* reader?

This much I do know. Self-torture is almost too juicy to resist. But let’s face it, I’m a member of the media. I mediate. I have to assume my audience wants to understand what I write, and I may not have the time or prowess to weave clarity from our largely incomprehensible art performance.

This piece will appear, in more or less this form, in the forthcoming magazine Public Relations from the RISD architecture department. Many thanks to Dana Ganssle, and her crew, for the edits. Yes!

People often think that bullshitting is the same as lying. This can’t be the case, though… at your last critique, was that long-winded rant you received about “interstitial dualities” or “recontextualization” a lie? Not necessarily. If you got out a dictionary and dutifully parsed out all the branching convoluted sentences, you might find that the nonsense people concoct at these things is actually factually correct. The strain of bullshit that percolates in schools like ours is more about confusion than it is about outright deception.

You can, of course, use bullshit to obfuscate a lie. When James Frey, the now-infamous Oprah-anointed memoirist, was recently found to have fabricated his shady past to make himself seem more interesting, that was a lie. But when called on by Larry King, he said things like “95 percent of my book is true” and “all memoirs are subjective”, citing numerous examples. These things were arguably true, but they were also total bullshit.

I started systematically studying bullshit at RISD shortly after I arrived in the graduate graphic design program. I would be at a crit, and someone would say “Yes, I’m fascinated and inspired by the notion of interconnected linear elements.” Why couldn’t they just say “I like lines” and be done with it? And moreover, how could a rational (and most likely talented) human being say such a thing with a straight face?

My first project was to compile all the bullshit words and phrases I could find into a bullshit dictionary. This was easy and fun; by including commentary, I could finally say what I really thought about such vapid terms like “innovation” or “emergent behavior”. The book is shaping up to be a decent field guide to navigating some of the nonsense we’re exposed to daily in art and design circles.

It became clear, however, that the bullshit goes far deeper than mere words and phrases. There are more complex patterns of obfuscating nonsense at work, and they vary greatly between departments and subjects. For example, one of the first things the RISD graphic design curriculum beats out of its new members is the use of most subjective descriptive terms, like “beautiful” or “disgusting.” So you end up with GD students making bizarrely pseudoscientific proclamations like “This generates a fantastic visceral response.”

That’s just in GD, though. I wouldn’t suggest trotting out such speech-pattern chestnuts over in the BEB. In architecture, you’ll want to talk of systematized spatial logic, of mutant typologies, and of sympathetic abstraction, with maybe a few Italian vocab words like pallazo thrown in to seal the deal. And both of these bullshit methods are entirely different from your average discussion in textiles, where the use of the word “beautiful” is not only permitted but pervasive.

It’s a bloody mess. But it’s our mess, indeed, and I want to help. I’m gathering data like this by visiting critiques in as many departments as I can. I record these critiques on tape, and then transcribe them, allowing the patterns of speech to emerge on paper. The book I end up with from this material will provide a direct window into the bizarro-world of linguistic alchemy that we seem to be brewing.