“You have a problem here, don’t you?” a prominent British radio journalist asked recently. “No, but we have some issues to look into,” the interviewee replied. “I’m not sure I know the difference,” the journalist responded.
Well here’s a suggestion. A problem is something that has gone wrong and needs fixing. An issue is something that needs checking, but may or may not have gone wrong. Well, at least that’s the formal meaning.
But we can forgive the journalist. Interviewees have been abusing “issue” for so long now as a way to avoid admitting that a “problem” actually exists, that it has become almost a synonym in the public mind. There are plenty more where this came from: “challenging” instead of “disastrous”, “to let go” instead of “to fire”, “to downsize” instead of “to reduce”, “to negatively impact” rather than “to harm, or damage”, etc, etc, everyone can list their own favourites.
These euphemisms are used because they are vaguer, have less impact and sound somehow as if they will upset listeners less than their forthright equivalents in normal speech. They feel safer than plain speech.
Our policy in all interviews is that when you have something positive to say, you should use language which is punchy, concrete and clear. You want the audience to take it in and remember it.
But when it is something negative in answer to a hostile question, your aim is often different. You want to sound as if you are answering the question directly, and giving as firm and convincing an answer as possible. But you do not necessarily want your words to take root in the listeners’ minds and become memorable.
In this case, dull phrasing can be an advantage. Thus you might say: “We are working hard to resolve some issues around book-keeping and staff performance in our office” instead of “we are struggling to make sense of our accounts and discipline our lazy and incompetent staff”. There’s nothing in the first version to stick in the listener’s mind.
A word of caution. Using officialese can come across as evasive, bureaucratic, unappealing, even cowardly. If a problem is obvious and well-known, the listener would far rather hear the honest admission “We need to fix the budget problem” than “We need to address the issues relating to the current budgeting situation.”
So choose your words with care. Phrases like “collateral damage” to describe civilians killed by themilitary can provoke contempt or even anger.
My all-time favourite is the admission by Emperor Hirohito in 1945 that Japan had lost its war with the United States which has been somewhat ridiculed by history (though in fairness the circumstances were constrained by tradition and politics). With two atomic bombs already dropped on Japan, the Soviet Union seizing Japanese territory in the north, and American troops about to invade the homeland itself, he declared: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage”. Indeed.
Oliver Wates, MediaTrain director