39 Commonly Misused Words and How to Use Them Correctly

This post is in partnership with Inc., which offers useful advice, resources and insights to entrepreneurs and business owners. The article below was originally published atInc.com.

Where the mechanics of writing are concerned, I’m far from perfect. One example: I always struggle with who and whom.(Sometimes I’ll even rewrite a sentence just so I won’t have to worry about which is correct.)

And that’s a real problem. The same way one misspelled word can get your résumé tossed onto the reject pile, one misused word can negatively impact your entire message.

Fair or unfair, it happens all the time–so let’s make sure it doesn’t happen to you.

My post 30 Incorrectly Used Words That Can Make You Look Bad resulted in readers providing a number of other examples of misused words, and here are some of them. Once again I’ve picked words that are typically used in business settings, with special emphasis on words that spell checker won’t correct.

Here we go:

Advise and advice

Aside from the two words being pronounced differently (the sin advise sounds like az), advise is a verb while advice is a noun. Advice is what you give (whether or not the recipient is interested in that gift is a different issue altogether) when you advise someone.

So, “Thank you for the advise” is incorrect, while “I advise you not to bore me with your advice in the future” is correct if pretentious.

If you run into trouble, just say each word out loud and you’ll instantly know which makes sense; there’s no way you’d ever say, “I advice you to…”

Ultimate and penultimate

Recently I received a pitch from a PR professional that read, “(Acme Industries) provides the penultimate value-added services for discerning professionals.”

As Inigo would say, “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Ultimate means the best, or final, or last. Penultimate means the last but one, or second to last. (Or, as a Monty Python-inspired Michelangelo would say, “the Penultimate Supper!”)

But penultimate doesn’t mean second-best. Plus, I don’t think my PR friend meant to say her client offered second-class services. (I think she just thought the word sounded cool.)

Also, keep in mind that using ultimate is fraught with hyperbolic peril. Are you–or is what you provide–really the absolute best imaginable? That’s a tough standard to meet.

Well and good

Anyone who has children uses good more often than he or she should. Since kids pretty quickly learn what good means, “You did good, honey” is much more convenient and meaningful than “You did well, honey.”

But that doesn’t mean good is the correct word choice.

Good is an adjective that describes something; if you did a good job, then you do good work. Well is an adverb that describes how something was done; you can do your job well.

Where it gets tricky is when you describe, say, your health or emotional state. “I don’t feel well” is grammatically correct, even though many people (including me) often say, “I don’t feel too good.” On the other hand, “I don’t feel good about how he treated me” is correct; no one says, “I don’t feel well about how I’m treated.”

Confused? If you’re praising an employee and referring to the outcome say, “You did a good job.” If you’re referring to how the employee performed say, “You did incredibly well.”

And while you’re at it, stop saying good to your kids and usegreat instead, because no one–especially a kid–ever receives too much praise.

If and whether

If and whether are often interchangeable. If a yes/no condition is involved, then feel free to use either: “I wonder whether Jim will finish the project on time” or “I wonder if Jim will finish the project on time.” (Whether sounds a little more formal in this case, so consider your audience and how you wish to be perceived.)

What’s trickier is when a condition is not involved. “Let me know whether Marcia needs a projector for the meeting” isn’t conditional, because you want to be informed either way. “Let me know if Marcia needs a projector for the meeting” is conditional, because you only want to be told if she needs one.

And always use if when you introduce a condition. “If you hit your monthly target, I’ll increase your bonus” is correct; the condition is hitting the target and the bonus is the result. “Whether you are able to hit your monthly target is totally up to you” does not introduce a condition (unless you want the employee to infer that your thinly veiled threat is a condition of ongoing employment).

Stationary and stationery

You write on stationery. You get business stationery, such as letterhead and envelopes, printed.

But that box of envelopes is not stationary unless it’s not moving–and even then it’s still stationery.

Award and reward

An award is a prize. Musicians win Grammy Awards. Car companies win J.D. Power awards. Employees win Employee of the Month awards. Think of an award as the result of a contest or competition.

A reward is something given in return for effort, achievement, hard work, merit, etc. A sales commission is a reward. A bonus is a reward. A free trip for landing the most new customers is a reward.

Be happy when your employees win industry or civic awards, and reward them for the hard work and sacrifices they make to help your business grow.

Sympathy and empathy

Sympathy is acknowledging another person’s feelings. “I am sorry for your loss” means you understand the other person is grieving and want to recognize that fact.

Empathy is having the ability to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and relate to how the person feels, at least in part because you’ve experienced those feelings yourself.

The difference is huge. Sympathy is passive; empathy is active. (Here’s a short video by Brené Brown that does a great job of describing the difference–and how empathy fuels connection while sympathy drives disconnection.)

Know the difference between sympathy and empathy, live the difference, and you’ll make a bigger difference in other people’s lives.

Criterion and criteria

A criterion is a principle or standard. If you have more than one criterion, those are referred to as criteria.

But if you want to be safe and you only have one issue to consider, just say standardor rule or benchmark. Then usecriteria for all the times there are multiple specifications or multiple criterion (OK, standards) involved.

Mute and moot

Think of mute like the button on your remote; it means unspoken or unable to speak. In the U.S., moot refers to something that is of no practical importance; a moot point is one that could be hypothetical or even (gasp!) academic. In British English, mootcan also mean debatable or open to debate.

So if you were planning an IPO, but your sales have plummeted, the idea of going public could be moot. And if you decide not to talk about it anymore, you will have gone mute on the subject.

Peak and peek

A peak is the highest point; climbers try to reach the peak of Mount Everest. Peekmeans quick glance, as in giving major customers a sneak peek at a new product before it’s officially unveiled, which hopefully helps sales peak at an unimaginable height.

Occasionally a marketer will try to “peak your interest” or “peek your interest,” but in that case the right word is pique, which means “to excite.” (Pique can also mean “to upset,” but hopefully that’s not what marketers intend.)

Aggressive and enthusiastic

Aggressive is a very popular business adjective: aggressive sales force, aggressive revenue projections, aggressive product rollout. But unfortunately, aggressive means ready to attack, or pursuing aims forcefully, possibly unduly so.

So do you really want an “aggressive” sales force?

Of course, most people have seen aggressive used that way for so long they don’t think of it negatively; to them it just means hard-charging, results-oriented, driven, etc., none of which are bad things.

But some people may not see it that way. So consider using words like enthusiastic,eager, committed, dedicated, or even (although it pains me to say it) passionate.

Then and than

Then refers in some way to time. “Let’s close this deal, and then we’ll celebrate!” Since the celebration comes after the sale, thenis correct.

Then is also often used with if. Think in terms of if-then statements: “If we don’t get to the office on time, then we won’t be able to close the deal today.”

Than involves a comparison. “Landing Customer A will result in higher revenue than landing Customer B,” or “Our sales team is more committed to building customer relationships than the competition is.”

Evoke and invoke

To evoke is to call to mind; an unusual smell might evoke a long-lost memory. To invoke is to call upon some thing: help, aid, or maybe a higher power.

So hopefully all your branding and messaging efforts evoke specific emotions in potential customers. But if they don’t, you might consider invoking the gods of commerce to aid you in your quest for profitability.

Or something like that.

Continuously and continually

Both words come from the root continue, but they mean very different things.Continuously means never ending. Hopefully your efforts to develop your employees are continuous, because you never want to stop improving their skills and their future.

Continual means whatever you’re referring to stops and starts. You might have frequent disagreements with your co-founder, but unless those discussions never end (which is unlikely, even though it might feel otherwise), then those disagreements are continual.

That’s why you should focus on continuous improvement but only plan to have continual meetings with your accountant: The former should never, ever stop, and the other (mercifully) should.

Systemic and systematic

If you’re in doubt, systematic is almost always the right word to use. Systematic means arranged or carried out according to a plan, method, or system. That’s why you can take a systematic approach to continuous improvement, or do a systematic evaluation of customer revenue or a systematic assessment of market conditions.

Systemic means belonging to or affecting the system as a whole. Poor morale could be systemic to your organization. Or bias against employee diversity could be systemic.

So if your organization is facing a pervasive problem, take a systematic approach to dealing with it—that’s probably the only way you’ll overcome it.

Impact and affect (and effect)

Many people (including until recently me) use impact when they should use affect. Impact doesn’t mean to influence;impact means to strike, collide, or pack firmly.

Affect means to influence: “Impatient investors affected our rollout date.”

And to make it more confusing, effect means to accomplish something: “The board effected a sweeping policy change.”

How you correctly use effect or affect can be tricky. For example, a board can affect changes by influencing them and can effect changes by directly implementing them. Bottom line, use effect if you’re making it happen, and affect if you’re having an impact on something that someone else is trying to make happen.

As for nouns, effect is almost always correct: “Employee morale has had a negative effect on productivity.” Affect refers to an emotional state, so unless you’re a psychologist, you probably have little reason to use it.

So stop saying you’ll “impact sales” or “impact the bottom line.” Use affect.

(And feel free to remind me when I screw that up, because I feel sure I’ll backslide.)

Between and among

Use between when you name separate and individual items. “The team will decide between Mary, Marcia, and Steve when we fill the open customer service position.” Mary, Marcia, and Steve are separate and distinct, so between is correct.

Use among when there are three or more items but they are not named separately. “The team will decide among a number of candidates when we fill the open customer service position.” Who are the candidates? You haven’t named them separately, s oamong is correct.

And we’re assuming there are more than two candidates; otherwise you’d say between. If there are two candidates you could say, “I just can’t decide between them.”

Everyday and every day

Every day means, yep, every day—each and every day. If you ate a bagel for breakfast each day this week, you had a bagel every day.

Everyday means commonplace or normal. Decide to wear your “everyday shoes” and that means you’ve chosen to wear the shoes you normally wear. That doesn’t mean you have to wear them every single day; it just means wearing them is a usual occurrence.

Another example is along and a long: Along means moving in a constant direction or a line, or in the company of others, whilea long means of great distance or duration. You wouldn’t stand in “along line,” but you might stand in a long line for a long time, along with a number of other people.

A couple more examples: a while and awhile, and any way andanyway.

If you’re in doubt, read what you write out loud. It’s unlikely you’ll think “Is there anyway you can help me?” sounds right.

Citi never reaps

( from the Economist)

Citigroup

Citi never reaps

Making money from a global banking network is as difficult as it is alluring

Mar 7th 2015 | NEW YORK | From the print edition

• 

WILLIAM BRADY (pictured, in the middle) and Howard Sheperd had each spent more than 30 years at National City Bank before becoming its leaders in 1948. But even after all that time, they were not really sure how the sprawling financial conglomerate that would become Citigroup made money. George Moore, who would later rise to chairman, was appointed head of a “New Look Committee” to unravel the mystery. His conclusion: “We have never really known just where we made our net profits, but have generally proceeded on the assumption that we should encourage the growth of all these businesses to the maximum, on the theory that the more they grow the more money we could make.”

The assumption under the current boss, Michael Corbat, is precisely the opposite. But working out how Citigroup makes its money—and therefore which parts of the business are most dispensable—is just as vexing. In total, Mr Corbat reckons 60 businesses have been sold since the crisis. Among them are brokerage arms in America and Japan, a student-loan operation and some credit-card units. The most visible contraction has been in Citi’s consumer business, which is shrinking from 50 countries to 24, and in America, from 14 cities to seven. This week, Citi announced the sale of OneMain Financial, a subsidiary that makes high-interest consumer loans, and a stake in Akbank, a Turkish lender.

In spite of all this restructuring, Citi’s performance remains dismal. Part of the problem is the endless restructuring itself: provisions related to it were $148m in the first quarter of 2013, $75m in the second, $133m in the third, $234m in the fourth, $211m in the first quarter of 2014, $397m in the second, $382m in the third and $655m in the fourth, according to S&P Capital IQ, a financial-data firm. Its return on equity last year was 3.4%. Regulators have frozen its dividend at one cent per share (a yield of less than 0.1%) since the crisis. Even as the share prices of other American banks approach or pass their pre-crisis peaks, Citi’s is down by 90% (see chart). Its market capitalisation is well below its book value, suggesting it would be more valuable if broken up.

On March 11th the Federal Reserve will reveal the results of the second of the two annual “stress tests” it conducts for big banks, which attempt to simulate downturns to make sure that banks have enough capital to withstand them. Citi failed this test in 2012 and in 2014, and as a result has not been allowed to raise its dividend. The first failure prompted the depature of its then chief executive, Vikram Pandit; a third one would probably put an end to Mr Corbat’s tenure.

Citi’s sprawl is hard to fathom. It is present in 101 countries, and handles $3 trillion of transactions daily. It finances $600 billion in trade every year. More than half its deposits are foreign—far more than any other American bank, according to Moebs Services, a research firm. Foreign operations provide 60% of its revenue; two-thirds come from emerging markets. This part of the bank initially catered to multinationals, and to the American government and military. But as ever more, and smaller, firms expanded abroad, its customer base grew.

Citi’s international presence has always been both a strength and a liability. Take its Chinese operations, which helped keep the bank afloat in the 1930s, only to be forcibly closed in 1949. By the same token, Banamex, its Mexican unit, has been one of the most profitable parts of the bank, but lost $360m due to fraud in 2013. Frank Vanderlip, the CEO who first expanded abroad, nearly killed the bank with a hefty bet on Russia just before the revolution. He was succeeded by James Stillman, who staked Citi’s fortunes on global sugar markets with similarly disastrous results. Next up was “Sunshine Charley” Mitchell, who expanded both abroad and at home in the run-up to the Depression, leaving the bank in need of its first government bail-out.

If anything, the risks of big international operations appear to be growing. The fines and investigations the bank faced for its dealings in American mortgages before the crisis seem to be fading away. But it faces continuing litigation over allegations that it manipulated currency markets and interest rates and helped its clients launder money. Banamex is the subject of a fresh investigation; foreign transactions that may have helped companies to avoid American taxes have also caught the authorities’ attention.

Increasingly, big banks are held responsible not only for their own misdeeds, but also for the conduct of their clients. They have to be on the look-out not only for specific crimes like fraud, but for unsavoury people and activities, from tax evasion to terrorism, more generally.

On top of this, big global banks face ever higher capital requirements, with overlapping regulations set in multiple jurisdictions. The discussion of Citi’s obligations in this respect in its latest regulatory filing extends over 17 pages. The most important elements, says Steven Chubak, an analyst with Nomura Securities, are the 9% in common equity demanded by international banking standards (more than double the pre-crisis level of 4%) and various surcharges imposed by the Fed, which push the total to 11%. Further impositions may be on the way, including a “countercyclical capital buffer”. Rules on holdings of liquid assets add yet more complication and expense. Each time the overall capital requirement increases by a percentage point, Citi’s return on equity declines by a similar amount, Mr Chubak estimates.

These rules are giving smaller banks, or purely domestically focused ones, a competitive advantage. American banks that regulators do not consider systemic, for instance, need an equity buffer of just 7%. Even Wells Fargo, America’s biggest bank by market capitalisation, must hold only 10%, Mr Chubak estimates, thanks to its domestic focus. It is no coincidence that Wells recently exceeded the record valuation for an American financial firm set by Citi in 2001, of $283 billion.

Mr Corbat’s response to all this, and Mr Pandit’s before him, has been to shrink and simplify. Citi’s workforce has dropped by over a third since 2007, from 375,000 to 241,000. It will continue to fall. Consumer businesses are being jettisoned in various countries in the Middle East and Latin America, where concerns about money-laundering and financing terrorism are most acute.

But just how far to go is hard to decide. Some activities still look like anomalies: it is the only big bank that uses proprietary designs for its cash machines. Others, such as OneMain, are easily shorn, but very profitable: its return on equity is 19%.

Reducing the retail business is especially fraught. Citi initially tried to shrink its operations in Texas to two cities, Dallas and Houston. But customers were put off by its diminished presence, so it was forced to pull out of the state altogether. Analysts question whether it has an adequate network in the suburbs of Chicago and Boston to preserve its business in those cities.

Contraction abroad carries similar risks. Operations in obscure or hazard-prone countries may provide little or no return on their own, but may also be where Citi provides the greatest value to multinationals, in that companies have few reputable alternatives when doing business in such places. Hiving off Citi’s corporate business in different countries would not make any sense: American clients come to it for seamless access to foreign markets, and vice versa.

It is possible that Citi is already shrinking too much, consuming the seed corn that will produce profits later on, speculates Charles Peabody, an analyst with Portales Partners. Operations like retail banking, brokerage and asset management take time to build but provide steady pay-outs once established. It is this part of Citi that is being shed.

What remains is a more opaque and volatile corporate bank. Citi, Mr Peabody says, has recently become far more eager to undertake various risky sorts of transactions, such as “bought deals”, in which a bank buys a huge block of shares in the hope that it can sell them in smaller parcels at a profit. The most recent data from American regulators, from September, show that Citi held derivatives contracts with a notional value of $70 trillion—far more than any other commercial bank.

Citi says it is simply catering to its customers, who want to hedge against movements in commodities and currencies. But it is also on an increasingly urgent hunt for decent profits. How to produce them, however, is a question that has bedevilled Citigroup for more than a century.

Scientists have figured out what makes Indian food so delicious

Curries, rice, naan bread, samosas and pakora. (iStock)

Indian food, with its hodgepodge of ingredients and intoxicating aromas, is coveted around the world. The labor-intensive cuisine and its mix of spices is more often than not a revelation for those who sit down to eat it for the first time. Heavy doses of cardamom, cayenne, tamarind and other flavors can overwhelm an unfamiliar palate. Together, they help form the pillars of what tastes so good to so many people.

But behind the appeal of Indian food — what makes it so novel and so delicious — is also a stranger and subtler truth. In a large new analysis of more than 2,000 popular recipes, data scientists have discovered perhaps the key reason why Indian food tastes so unique: It does something radical with flavors, something very different from what we tend to do in the United States and the rest of Western culture. And it does it at the molecular level.

Before we go further, let's take a step back and consider what flavors are and how they interact. If you were to hold a microscope to most Western dishes, you would find an interesting but not all-too-surprising trend. Popular food pairings in this part of the world combine ingredients that share like flavors, which food chemists have broken down into their molecular parts — precise chemical compounds that, when combined, give off a distinct taste.

Most of the compounds have scientific names, though one of the simpler compounds is acetal, which, as the food chemist George Burdock has written, is "refreshing, pleasant, and [has a] fruity-green odor," and can be found in whiskey, apple juice, orange juice and raw beets. On average, there are just over 50 flavor compounds in each food ingredient.

A nifty chart shared by Scientific American in 2013 shows which foods share the most flavor compounds with others and which food pairings have the most flavor compounds in common. Peanut butter and roasted peanuts have one of the most significant overlaps (no surprise there). But there are connections that are more difficult to predict: strawberries, for instance, have more in common with white wine than they do with apples, oranges or honey.

Data crunching Indian recipes

Chefs in the West like to make dishes with ingredients that have overlapping flavors. But not all cuisines adhere to the same rule. Many Asian cuisines have been shown to belie the trend by favoring dishes with ingredients that don't overlap in flavor. And Indian food, in particular, is one of the most powerful counterexamples. 

Researchers at the Indian Institute for Technology in Jodhpur crunched data on several thousand recipes from a popular online recipe site called TarlaDalal.com. They broke each dish down to its ingredients, and then compared how often and heavily ingredients share flavor compounds.

The answer? Not too often.

Here's an easy way to make sense of what they did, through the lens of a single, theoretical dish. Say you have a dish with 4 different ingredients, like the one below:

Each one of those ingredients has its own list of flavor compounds. And any two of those ingredients' lists might have some overlap. Take the coconut and onion, for instance. We can all agree that these two things are pretty different, but we can also see (in the Venn diagram below) that there's some overlap in their flavor make-up. (Ignore the math symbols.)

You could create the same diagram for all the ingredients with overlapping flavor compounds, as in this diagram. There are six that have overlap.  (Again, ignore the math.)

The researchers did this for each of the several thousand recipes, which used a total of 200 ingredients.  They examined how much the underlying flavor compounds overlapped in single dishes and discovered something very different from Western cuisines. Indian cuisine tended to mix ingredients whose flavors don't overlap at all.

"We found that average flavor sharing in Indian cuisine was significantly lesser than expected," the researchers wrote.

In other words, the more overlap two ingredients have in flavor, the less likely they are to appear in the same Indian dish.

The unique makeup of Indian cuisine can be seen in some dishes more than others, and it seems to be tied to the use of specific ingredients. Spices usually indicate dishes with flavors that have no chemical common ground.

More specifically, many Indian recipes  contain cayenne, the basis of curry powder that is in dishes like red curry, green curry, or massaman curry. And when a dish contains cayenne, the researchers found, it's unlikely to have other ingredients that share similar flavors. The same can be said of green bell pepper, coriander and garam masala, which are nearly as ubiquitous in Indian cuisine.

"Each of the spices is uniquely placed in its recipe to shape the flavor sharing pattern with rest of the ingredients," the researchers noted.

Milk, butter, bread, and rice, meanwhile—all of which are hallmarks of Western cuisine—were found to be associated with just the opposite: flavor pairings that match. When any of those ingredients appeared in an Indian dish, there was a good chance there would be a lot of flavor overlap.

A lesson for all chefs

The takeaway is that part of what makes Indian food so appealing is the way flavors rub up against each other. The cuisine is complicated, no doubt: the average Indian dish, after all, contains at least 7 ingredients, and the total number of ingredients observed by the researchers amounted to almost 200 out of the roughly 381 observed around the world. But all those ingredients — and the spices especially — are all uniquely important because in any single dish, each one brings a unique flavor.

But the upshot should also be a thought that we might be approaching food from the wrong angle. Combining ingredients with like flavors is a useful (and often delicious) strategy, but it might be a somewhat misleading rule of thumb. Indian cuisine, after all, is cherished globally, and yet hinges on a decidedly different ingredient pairing logic.

Roberto A. Ferdman is a reporter for Wonkblog covering food, economics, immigration and other things. He was previously a staff writer at Quartz.

The office cubicle ( from the Economist )

Inside the box

How workers ended up in cubes—and how they could break free

IN THE 1960s, Robert Propst, an inventor and artist who had patents in heart valves, livestock-tagging machines and aeroplane parts, was asked by Herman Miller, an American design company, to find problems outside the furniture industry that could be solved with design. He flooded the company with concepts ranging from agriculture to medicine, but in the end found himself drawn to the problems of office life. He was particularly troubled by how sedentary people were. The consequences were clear in insurance and medical data. As a sufferer from back pain, he understood the need for regular movement and good posture.

Propst thought workers should have standing and sitting desks. He designed a perching seat, dreamed up display surfaces and created a prototype napping pad, an inch and a quarter thick and two feet wide (3cm by 60cm), that could be hung up for storage. Sleeping in the office, he thought, would make people more productive. He was, in many ways, ahead of his time.

His ideas culminated in the first modular office system, the “Action Office 2”, in 1968. At that time many firms put managers in offices and their subordinates in open “bullpens”, at pedestal desks lined in rows. Now this space could be broken up by vertical panels that slotted together in many ways. Propst suggested giving each worker a clamshell arrangement that offered both privacy and a view, and equipping it with desks of different heights. Areas for informal meetings and coffee could be created. The possibilities were endless.

Best, Propst believed, would be to join the panels at 120º angles. But his customers realised that they could squeeze more people in if they constructed cubes. A rigid 90º connector was therefore designed to join a panel to one, two or three more. Thus was born the cubicle, and Propst came to be known as its creator. He was horrified.

Other furniture-makers, including Haworth, Steelcase and Knoll, were soon producing their own systems. Cubicles were cheap, and meant a growing professional class could be packed in like battery hens, but with the illusion of individual offices. In America cubicles benefited from a tweak to the tax code that made it easier to write off depreciating assets such as furniture. Between 1977 and 1997 sales in America grew 20-fold.

The march of the cubicle continues. Around 40m North Americans now work in cubicles and they are being installed from Bangalore to Beijing. In 2012 Meg Whitman, the boss of Hewlett-Packard, turfed executives out of corner offices and into cubicles. Even publishers are converting. Last year Hachette installed 520 cubes in its pricey Manhattan headquarters. The boss has one, too—albeit, with a window.

The sick bay

At first, chopping bullpens up into boxes seemed to fit with a new egalitarian mood. Some management theorists regarded cubicles as an uprising against the old order, where the desks of office serfs were lined up for inspection, factory-style, by managers who emerged from plush private domains. But not everyone agreed. George Nelson, a famed designer for Herman Miller, wrote to a colleague in 1970 that cubicles were “dehumanising” and suited for “corporate zombies, the walking dead”. The Dilbert cartoons of Scott Adams have long espoused the cause of the dispirited cubicle denizen and branded cubicles a sign of an uncaring employer.

And as they have become near-ubiquitous, it has become increasingly clear that far from offering a clever compromise between the economy of open-plan and the privacy of individual offices, cubicles are in many ways worse than either. In particular, they cause a number of health problems, some less obvious than others.

Their rise coincided with the energy crisis of the 1970s, which prompted firms to make buildings more airtight. While artificial ventilation recirculated fumes silently released by carpets, wall coverings and the fabric of the cubicles themselves, their high walls added to the problem by obstructing airflow. Office workers complained of headaches, fatigue, coughs, sinus infections and even cancers.

After many years, America’s Environmental Protection Agency recognised formaldehyde, one of the substances emitted, as a probable carcinogen and regulated its use. Modern office furniture is less toxic. Between 1985 and 2005 the level of formaldehyde given off by cubicles fell by half. But poor ventilation is still common. Many studies have shown it causes lower productivity and increased sick leave.

Other cubicle-related health problems have taken longer to emerge. Because cubicles provide only the illusion of privacy, not the real thing, they do nothing to stop infectious diseases. Sharing an office raises the chances of getting more than two colds a year. In 2011 Danish scientists found that workers whose offices held at least six people took 62% more sick leave than those in private offices. And last year Swedish researchers studying the link between office layouts and illness found that people who worked in open-plan offices had the highest risk of becoming ill. The reason, they concluded, was more than just the easier spread of infections. Stress caused by lack of privacy and workers’ inability to control their surroundings played a part, too.

Open-plan offices are noisier and more interruption-prone. Too much noise causes high blood pressure, sleep problems and difficulty in concentrating. And cubicles’ flimsy walls do little to dampen sound. In studies where sound levels were raised from 39 to 51 decibels—roughly equivalent to moving from an average living room to a road with light traffic—participants were more tired and less motivated.

Whereas cubicles fail to block unwanted noise, they do all too well at blocking much-needed light. Many cubicle-dwellers see no daylight during office hours, with miserable effects on their well-being. A recent study found that workers deprived of sunlight get less sleep and physical activity than those who sit by windows. There are likely to be other ill effects from sitting in an artificially lit box all day: hospital patients recover faster and take fewer painkillers when they have more daylight.

Views matter, too. A study in 2003 in Sacramento found that call-centre workers with the best views processed calls 6-12% faster than those with no view. Office workers with better views were much more likely to describe themselves as healthy, and less likely to say they were fatigued. They also performed 10-25% better on tests of mental function and memory recall. Higher cubicle partitions were associated with working more slowly.

Cubicles even make people behave badly. Researchers at Cornell studied 229 employees at eight firms and found that those in cubicles were more prone than those in open-plan offices to have long, loud conversations—sometimes unrelated to work—with colleagues or on the phone. The reason seems to be that cubicles mask the social cues such as facial expressions and body language that influence social interactions. They thus make it easier to eat a smelly lunch or guffaw on the phone, oblivious to the reactions of those nearby. Those missing cues also interfere with other elements of good etiquette, such as not startling people or interrupting them when they are busy.

So partial privacy is in some ways worse than none at all. Conversations in cubicles are widely audible, but it is impossible to know who is listening, and humans, who made it through prehistory by keeping an ear out for predators, like to know where sounds are coming from. In a cubicle farm the origins of a sound—a chatting colleague, a ringing phone or a tapping keyboard—are hard to decipher. People try to adjust to the unsatisfactory combination of public and private: some say “knock knock” when approaching a cubicle; signs and headphones are used to signal “do not disturb”. Workers, the Cornell study suggested, like closed offices best of all. But open-plan offices are preferred to cubicles.

Why, then, are cubicle farms still being built? Perhaps because privacy is so valued that office planners opt for the illusion of it, rather than the undisguised reality of communal space. And a cubicle can be personalised: how about wallpaper, a rug, fairy lights or a chandelier? Some cube-dwellers hang curtains at the entrance, and it is possible to buy a door. One website shows how to make a fake window. It is all reminiscent of laboratory mice building nests in the most unpropitious surroundings.

On top of all this, cubicle workers who feel that the walls are closing in on them are onto something. When cubicle spaces are renovated, says a design firm, they often shrink from eight feet by ten per person, to five foot by five. In 1994 the average North American office worker had 90 square feet of space. By 2010 this was 75 square feet. (Executive management gained floor space over the same period, according to the International Facility Management Association.)

For reasons of economy, if nothing else, a return to private offices seems unlikely. But mobile technology is making it possible to work anywhere. Could it also offer an escape from the cubicle farm?

Breaking down barriers

One early attempt to reshape the workplace to take advantage of new technology was the “future office” created by Chiat/Day, an American advertising agency, in the 1990s. Data ports were scattered around so that workers could plug in their (pre-wireless) laptops wherever they were. Receivers in the ceiling allowed them to use radiophones. Intended to mimic a college campus, it had neither private offices nor cubicles, but instead clusters of couches and tabletops, with almost no personal space apart from some small lockers.

Design magazines loved it, but it was a disaster. One employee took to carting her things around in a child’s red wagon. Work suffered as people lost documents and struggled to find laptops, phones or places to sit. Turf wars ensued as some camped out in favourite spots or ordered underlings to arrive early to nab equipment.

Now Herman Miller, the firm that, however unintentionally, started the shift to cubicles, is trying to reshape the office yet again. The “Living Office” is a new attempt to combine the best of private and social space. It looks rather like a fancy hotel: open-plan but with desks set in friendly clusters and separated by low, clear partitions. Workers can also perch at a counter-top next to the coffee station, or lounge on sofas in a plaza or café-style seating in a courtyard. Benches nicknamed “landing strips” are placed outside conference rooms to encourage post-meeting chats. Pods are available for concentrated work, and even for relaxation. Everywhere there are glass-encased meeting rooms and a few solo spaces. About 30% of the staff have no permanent desk.

Light streams in and sound is controlled with dividing walls and “pink noise”—white noise focused on the frequencies of human speech, which can reduce the distance at which a conversation is audible from 50 feet to 12-16 feet. The result, the firm says, is greater focus, accuracy and short-term memory.

Open-plan and flexible workspaces are spreading. Almost all the offices Herman Miller supplies in Asia are now open-plan; Microsoft’s Singapore offices have no assigned desks. When open-plan offices are designed to suit a wide variety of working styles and tasks, even senior executives can be keen. One at Mars Drinks in West Chester, Pennsylvania, is slightly wistful when he recalls his previous job, which came with a private office with a balcony overlooking the Piazza del Duomo in Milan. But he is more productive now, he says, in an open-plan area with other senior staff.

Such redesigns could be a more palatable way to save space than simply squeezing workers into smaller boxes. Intel recently decided to rethink its offices when it realised that 60% of its cubicles were empty most of the time. Herman Miller, which practises what it preaches, has about seven desks per ten staff at its own offices; even senior managers work in a cluster of open-plan desks. At Britain’s Department for Trade and Industry, occupancy levels rarely reached 60%; it and several other British public-sector organisations have done similar redesigns, cutting from one desk per person to around eight desks per ten.

What workers need from their offices has long been clear. A flexible workspace that encourages movement, combined with mobile technology, could finally liberate them from the cubicle farm—but only if employers pay heed to the evidence, rather than the short-term savings. Even cubicles were Utopian before the accountants took over.

Life After ........

Davaun T Kurcz

​

I

​

n a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the 

other: 

“Do you believe in life after delivery?” 

The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be 

something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare 

ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. 

What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light 

than here.

​ ​

Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from 

our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t 

understand now.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And 

eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord 

supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical 

cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically 

excluded.”

The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and 

maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need 

this physical cord anymore.”

The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover if there is life, 

then why has no one has ever come back from there? 

Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is 

nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us 

nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will 

meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? 

That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”

The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded 

by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her 

this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that 

She​ doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in 

silence and you focus and you really listen, you can 

perceive Her presence,and you can hear Her loving voice, 

calling down from above.” 

- Útmutató a Léleknek