Unwrapping loose military terminology in everyday life.
Hi there. This week I’m going to dwell on a rather pedantic point which nonetheless is important because of what it says about our politics. I was listening to the Irish Times Inside Politics Podcast during the week and one of the commentators talked about something being a “very costly exercise.”
He wasn’t talking about the government’s pre-budget modelling. Or the performative report into the supply chain for Aughinish Alumina1. Or any number of things which have an element of make-believe. No, he was talking about a deportation flight where about 40 failed asylum seekers were being repatriated. A very real and non-make-believe situation.
Whatever your views on immigration are, it’s just plain wrong to talk about this being an “exercise” of any sort. The deportees, on arrival in South Africa, didn’t gather in a circle and hold a hot debrief of lessons learned during the exercise. The police and medical teams weren’t graded on their performance throughout. There was no “ENDEX” announcement after which everyone got to knock off for the evening.
The reason I’m writing about it this week is that I’ve seen this “exercise” cliché crop up more than once. In the spirit of one of my favourite bloggers, who recently wrote a post decrying YouTube vlogger clichés, I’m going to go off on one about “the purpose of the exercise.”
I’ll start by laying out the problem: the number of times that we use “exercise” in politics, business, and academia. Then I’ll explain what an exercise actually is. I’ll finish with the reason you should care, which is that the misuse of the term “exercise” allows us to skate over a whole bunch of serious and important things by gamifying them.
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1. How “exercise” is used
Not all misuses are created equal. The “exercise” is used as a banal but mildly inappropriate cliché, as an unwelcome corporate jargon crutch, and as a deeply regrettable metaphor for politics. Let’s deal with each of these in turn.
Firstly, in its most benign form, the word is used as part of a longer phrase, a compound cliché. These are usually deployed in the pejorative sense, which limits their harm. They’re still wrong, as we’ll see below, and it would be remiss of me to give them a free pass. Let’s look at some examples.
A “box-ticking exercise” is one variant of the cliché. Nobody ever defends the poor box-ticking exercise! Here’s one in the wild, with a UK parliamentarian exhorting the banks to avoid this pitfall. Having been on many exercises, I am partial to the charms of a simple box-ticking type.
Another exercise no-one wants to be a part of is a “one-size-fits-all-exercise.” American Express were at pains to point out to their investors that their “approach to creating value propositions was not a one-size-fits-all-exercise.” That must be a relief, although if I were an investor I would hope that the value propositions weren’t an exercise of any sort.
The second type of “exercise” we see is a bit more insidious than the examples above. This is the corporate jargon crutch, where the term “exercise” is appended to something awful to make it seem less so.
A legal advice consultancy advises that “Beyond legal exposure, a poorly managed redundancy exercise can damage workforce morale and lead to reputational harm.” I think the fact that you’re calling it a “redundancy exercise” is evidence of poor management from the get-go. Another legal firm tells us how to avoid some of the common pitfalls of a “restructuring exercise.”
The Bank of England does a “benchmarking exercise” on banks to assess their financial risk. The European Banking Authority does a similar “supervisory benchmarking exercise.” This is admittedly less horrifying than mass layoffs, but it’s still not how I want my financial regulators spending their time. Less exercising, please, and more regulating. Be more like Homer, and less like Mr. Burns:
The third and worst type of exercise abuse is in politics. This arena is unfortunately ripe with so-called “exercises.” UK Government funding for research hinges on a quinquennial “Research Assessment Exercise.”
Donald Trump’s chaotic behaviour viz. Israel and Palestine is “an exercise in futility.” The plot twist is that this was published in 2018, so the “futility” part is spot-on, but the ~100,000 people killed in the region since then might take issue with the “exercise” framing (were they not too dead to do so).
Roger Stone might even have2 said that “The general election is not an organizational exercise – it’s a mass media exercise.” The fact that someone like Stone is (possibly) using “exercise” in this context should serve as a warning for us all.
Finally, as we saw at the top of this article, it’s found its way into Irish political discourse in a deeply unfortunate description of people being deported.
What ties together all of the above examples? Not much, really. The only unifying feature is that, in each case, the word “exercise” is used to mean “thing.” But that’s not what it means. What does it mean?
2. What “exercise” actually means
Let me put my military hat on for this section. An exercise is a simulated “thing.” More specifically, it’s a simulated version of an operation.
Operations = Things
Exercises = Simulated things
Got that? I could try to explain this more clearly, but Father Ted has summed it up better than I ever could:
I previously wrote about how the “sausage” of military operations is made. If you haven’t read it, the message is simple: practice. Again, just like in Father Ted:
An exercise is just the “practice” part, formalised. That’s it. Every exercise has a purpose and every purpose supports some notional future operation. Here are some personal examples:
Example 1:
The purpose of this exercise was to demonstrate the effects of mild hypothermia.
Said by an instructor with a straight face to 30+ trainees arranged in ranks who had just spent the last ten minutes immersed in a frigid mountain river in an Irish winter. I can confirm that the purpose of the exercise was achieved.
Example 2:
The purpose of the exercise is to test your navigation skills with a map and compass at night.
Another instructor, moments before unleashing us at intervals on a wild goose chase to find grubby orange flags hidden in various undergrowth. Again, the purpose was achieved and was one of the more pleasurable parts of military training3.
Example 3:
The purpose of the exercise was to dislocate your expectations.
A grinning head instructor after giving us a fake “ENDEX4” order, bringing us back to the camp, and then wordlessly giving us our orders to deploy right back out to the cold, wet, miserable mountains for another day of pretend fighting. The trauma will stay with me forever, but so will the distrust of all promises from authority. Purpose definitely achieved.
If you want to take a step back from the military for a moment, then the most common everyday use for the term “exercise” is instructive. The first entry in the dictionary defines it as: “physical activity that you do to make your body strong and healthy.”
It’s a means to an end: you don’t lift weights to get better at lifting weights5, you lift them so that you can do things better in the real world (and, let’s be honest, to look better in [and out of] a t-shirt). The exercise is a simulated thing to make you better at the real thing.
Conclusion: Why it matters
If you think I’m being a bit unfair, you might have a point. There’s lots of loose language out there, after all, so what’s an “exercise” here or there? And it’s everywhere: I even found myself using the term recently in an example similar to the ones I decried above.
Language evolves. It’s never static. There never was a “baseline” of correct English against which we can measure and resist deviations. If anyone argues that there was, then they are deluded. So, what’s the point of this rant? Why did I spend the last 1,000+ words whingeing about a change in language?
We may not be able to stop language’s evolution (nor should we want to), but we can at least be aware of what we’re losing when we let a term lose its meaning through inappropriate use. It dies, but we can certainly pause to mark its passing.
The use of “exercise” to mean “thing” instead of “simulated thing” deprives us of a useful way of describing “simulated things.” You already see tautologies like “training exercise” or “simulation exercise” which are needed because “exercise” alone has lost its heft.
There’s a bigger problem, however, albeit a slightly contradictory one. Using “exercise” as everyday parlance for real things also diminishes their seriousness. This is clearly the case in some of the examples above. When companies say, “we’re carrying out a restructuring exercise,” that’s much easier than saying “we’re firing people.” It takes the harm out of a very serious topic.
When everything becomes an “exercise,” then is anything real? Does anything matter? Or is it all just part of a performance, an entertaining side-show to some real world with real consequences which we can’t influence? It’s hard to look at the performative nature of modern politics without coming to this conclusion. There are echoes of that other toxic cliché which The Economist‘s Bagehot columnist wrote about last year: “it’s not a good look.”
When forty people are bundled into a plane and deported, that isn’t an exercise, it’s all too real. The same when a bank is told to de-risk its balance sheet, or a research team gets told whether they get funding or not. I wish we could call these things what they are. But wishing is simply an exercise in futility.
What do you think? Please let me know in the comments below. As always, remember to subscribe if you haven’t already. Thanks again for reading and see you next week.
Cover picture: Father Ted, “Good Luck, Father Ted” (S1 E1), Channel 4 (1995), image from here.
- For the non-Irish among you, this is a giant alumina factory on the Shannon Estuary in Ireland. It’s owned by Rusal and exports its output to Russia (among other places) where it is further processed into aluminium. The controversy is that Ireland, staunch flyer of Ukrainian flags on town halls throughout the country, doesn’t want to accept the fact that a giant regional employer is directly contributing to the Russian war machine in Ukraine. ↩︎
- I include the caveat that the only sources I’ve found for this quote are BrainyQuote and The Center Square, and I don’t trust pictures with words on the internet. ↩︎
- Editor: Only in hindsight—be honest. My response: I stand by it. ↩︎
- ENDEX = End of exercise. ↩︎
- Unless you lift weights for sport. But, again, sport isn’t real. ↩︎
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