TITLE: /ˈkwälədē/
The following is an editorial. The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author. If, however, this essay attracts shitloads of AdSense dollars, DCS takes full ownership.
The Greeks, among their many contributions, originated a lot of cool words. Mammothrept is a personal fav. It means a naughty child.
Its compound construction is fascinating:
Mammos (mother, grandmother) + threptos (nourishment)
When you look at the word again, can you now see the correlation between any infant’s brattiness and grandma’s bosomy goodness…?
If the Greeks haven’t found a way to your brain-pan today, you’re clearly not listening to podcasts, eating protein-rich yogurt or following the DeadCinemaSociety.
The ancient Greeks surfaced this week because we, as a society, have asked:
What is quality?
For Greek scholars, “quality” is codified in Aristotle’s work, Categories — a text from a much larger work, Organon. No intellectual presumptions here. I’m at the very beginning of his work myself, and challengingly, will parse my thoughts over more essays here.
Reader’s note: Please return here so our hosting provider can send us smiley faces that our site’s click count is going up.
Here’s where I want to start.
I’ve commonly known “quality” and its practice through business. The term was used so often in meetings, ad copy, sales calls, or corporate retreats that its normative meaning got lost.
I worked in retailing and we had bloodthirst for quality. Yes we were in business but we were leaders in education as well. Pre-internet, we dominated Sunday newspapers with double-truck ads and colorful inserts extolling the features and benefits of our quality consumer goods. Nothing tickled me more than hearing a customer regale me in store with the very “quality” copy I had re-edited a dozen times as if he were the master and I the student.
Rightly, among a few ambitions, the marketplace goal of any good or service is to achieve recognition as the highest quality possible. In fact, once achieved, it continues. Its further target is the universal recognition of said achievement as the qualitative standard for that particular good or service delivered; and for it to then become the accepted best practice and market leader not above all…
…but for all.
Creepily enough, this achieved standard has steps and protocols guiding its enduring duplication of consistent, and ideally, better quality forever because it’s all guided by a team fittingly called:
Quality Management.
Back to Greece.
While Aristotle searched for a more objective codification of quality, it was Protagoras who fascinated me. I know a little about him since his image was briefly my iPhone 4 screensaver — today I have “The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis” instead.
This Greek thing is not a passing interest. We’ll do show and tell soon enough.
Protagoras was a pre-Socratic philosopher who believed that “Man is the measure of all things.” He believed strongly in subjectivity. He valued man’s opinion of others and things. He would have made a great addition to DCS.
He would have understood PayPal and their merry band of coders ceaselessly popping up on my phone to qualify my UX with their robust app.
Here was my “qualified” assessment of it:
Like Millard Fillmore, I grew up in the Finger Lakes thirsting for adventure. One summer, a man, simple in feature, offered me a Ziplock bag for foreign coins. I pored over the coppery and silvery images of world leaders who fearlessly stood down American imperialism and lost. The dirty currency jangling in my pocket until the ice cream truck’s tintinnabulation drowned it out. Often, with a melty Drumstick in hand, I would engage the vendor in some doublespeak about foreign exchange rates, alerting him to the rarities which lined my pockets and their potential worth. Bemused, he would ask how I acquired this money.
“I travel.”
He laughed.
“You don’t have a passport.”
I nodded.
“Not needed when you have a parachute.”
For the next month, I regaled him with travel folderol and he gave me free BombPops. He loved how my lips got redder from the colored ice sugar. I was just peaceful being adored by yet another strange man. On the lark, he suggested we run away and ride the wealth from my coinage into a summery pursuit along the railroad and hitch up with a carnival.
I enthusiastically agreed. For who can possibly resist the midway’s peripatetic capture?
Yowzah!
Prior to DCS, my philosophical chops were embarrassingly feckless. Today they are just feckless. Gently, over time, DCS has exercised them so adequately that my thirst for Greek (and original) wisdom has crept back into vision.
More to come on qualified quality in 2021
0 Comments