Tietokirja.fi (“Nonfiction.Finland”) has become Finland’s most interesting book festival, especially for those who don’t care for the usual book-fair fuss. Each year, the program is more varied and offers a great range of speakers. On both Wednesday and Thursday last week, concurrent sessions were full; in fact, not everyone who wanted to attend could get in.

My favorites from the opening ceremony were MP Timo Harakka and historian Teemu Keskisarja. Harakka cleverly described three vibrant types of non-fiction books: selfies (like celebrity “all about me” books), pamphlets, and historical drafts. Keskisarja, in turn, promised to give an energetic rant, railing about  the ”globalization rut” of Finnish universities as well as the Internet’s virtual reality. “Other than that,” he said as he wound down, “I think that the Internet should be destroyed”.

One of the most interesting panels dealt with freedom of speech. Journalist Elina Grundström brought up some alarming developments. According to her, arrests of journalists in Europe have quadrupled over the last two quarters, and fewer parties are defending traditional freedom of speech. Further, in many countries social media has been harnessed as a tool for state propaganda.

In a humorous dialogue, Pekka Seppänen and Helena Åhman critiqued management books. There’s always some management style leading the business-fashion parade. Seppänen and Åhman maintain that management should choose its approach based on the specific situation, not by what all the other managers are doing. We language people, of course, were impressed by Seppänen’s wordplay like: “Strategy needs a sound footing because it’s hard to grasp”.

As the Jargon 2017 winner, the FCG forum chose a government proposal on legislation dealing with freedom of choice in social and health services. Forum members were particularly impressed by the language that deals with the impact of the law, which had previously been criticized by MP Maarit Feldt-Ranta:

“Estimated as a whole, the proposed model of production, considering the individual’s opportunities for performance and for strengthening of user status, along with the optional strengthening of basic services, as well as on the basis of impact assessment, is justified from the perspective of probable likelihood of strengthening.”

In addition to the multiple uses of “strengthen,” the winner relentlessly deployed social and health care neologisms like capitation compensation and self-monitoring programs. Having a social service dictionary does not justify erecting such barriers to understanding. Nor do plodding circular definitions such as “service need assessment means the service need assessment defined in the Social Service Act and in the Elderly Services Law.”

Ulla Tiililä has taken a wider focus on the important role of language in the social and health care sector. Proposed reforms will require staff to produce numerous new documents. These will in turn demand know-how and additional effort that the lawmakers seem not to understand at all. Tiililä writes: “When documents are the core content of the reform, we must also ask whether there are enough communication skills to produce them. If there is no competence, the texts will hardly satisfy the requirements of meaningful, clear and understandable communications.”

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The Word of the Week is going on holiday for a few relaxing months of dissertation writing and will return in August. A beautiful summer to all language lovers!

Numerical expressions vary between languages, so if a writer isn’t careful, usage from a dominant language can creep into a smaller one. Many usages in English differ from the preferred form in Finnish.

• In English, decimals are separated by a dot (3.1); in Finnish, by a comma (3.1).
• English separates large numbers into groups with commas (30,000), Finnish uses spaces (30 000).
• The percent sign in English comes immediately after the number (5%). The Finnish usage adds a space (5 %).
• For sums of money, English places the symbol in front of the number ( $100); Finnish places it after (100 €).
• For clock times, English writers separate the hour from the minutes with a colon (8:15); we use a period (8.15).
• The usual form for dates in the U.S. is month/day/year (06-03-2017). Finns use day/month/year (3.6.2017).
• Recommended formats for phone numbers vary in English style manuals, but in general they include parentheses or hyphens: +44 (0) 122 12345, 301-234-5678. In Finland, we use only spaces.
• Typically when English uses only the last two digits of a year, it includes an apostrophe (’98). In Finnish, the numbers stand alone (98).

English tends to use Roman numerals more than Finnish does. When used for years (MDCCLXVIII), Finns struggle a bit to recall the meanings of L (50), C (100), D (500) and M (1000) along with the more familiar I, V and X. The lower-case Roman numerals used in the pages of book introductions (i, ii, iii, iv) also strike Finns as peculiar.

I attended the second annual Finnish Conference of Writing Research, held this year at the University of Jyväskylä. The theme was change and transformation in writing. What kind of ideas did I pick up in the two days of talks?

Anne Mäntysen‘s speech made us think about one-on-one interactions between teachers and students, such as critiquing work. Research suggests that in Finland tutoring sessions are more hierarchical and one-sided than in Sweden.

Niina Hynninen discussed how the text in one English-language scientific article took shape. The authors negotiated about the acceptability of language and not simply its correctness. For example, writers often do not want specifically British usage for an article directed at an international audience.

The broad meaning of language was emphasized by Ulla Tiililä: for example, government becomes concrete through its use of language. It is interesting to analyze whose voice comes through in written decisions affecting the public: the government expert’s, or the citizen’s?

Sonja Kniivilä spoke about voices in scientific writing. According to her, research may have three voices: that of the field in general, that of the sources, and that of the author. As part of instruction for writing, the ability to recognize voices is crucial. For that reason Kniivilä has her students mark different voices in text with different colors.

In the closing speech, Minna-Riitta Luukka illustrated the multidimensionality of writing and language skills. Writing research has expanded from individuals to community, from learning to socialization, and from general knowledge to situational skills. Language, and the text it appears in, are related to everything in society, so we need to deepen our linguistic awareness.

In lieu of chasing jargon, while visiting the Netherlands I was hunting flowers. The tulip fields were especially impressive in Noordoostpolster. On my trip, I learned that tulips originally come from Turkey; their name refers to a turban, likely because of the flower’s shape. From the Turkish word tülbent, we derive the Dutch tulpe, French tulipe, Italian tulipano, English tulip and Finnish tulppaani.

Names for many familiar flowers seem similar across many European languages. The rose is rooted in Greek rhodon, which has generated Dutch roos, English rose, Swedish ros, Russian roza, and many others. Also from the same word family is rhododendron (in Finnish alppiruusu ”alpine rose”), a combination of the Greek word rhodon ‘rose’ and dendron ‘tree’.

Greek narkissos apparently initially referred to our iris or some other lily instead of our current narcissus. The narko-beginning suggests that the original flower had some kind of drug effect; narkos refers to numbness. The name of a spectacular gladiolus (in Finnish miekkalilja ”sword lily”) comes from the Latin word, which means a small sword and has the same root as gladiator “swordsman”.

The Finnish name for violet is orvokki or orvonkukka (in English ”orphan flower”). In Finland, you can plant them in early spring; apparently hard conditions have made them tenacious survivors.

Should I follow everyone on Twitter who follows me? Last week I gained a new follower – someone who was following 300,000 other accounts. This tells me something about the way he uses Twitter: he’s not reading anything those people post. Often these accounts belong to marketers for whom Twitter is a low-priced ad channel and a sales tool. Such an advertiser vanishes if you don’t follow back.

In my opinion, reading and commenting on other people’s tweets are at least as important as sharing your own. I still consider Twitter as a news source and a learning environment, so I prefer to follow those who share my interests. Inevitably this means I’ll miss many good content providers, but I need to manage the overall stream of messages. If you follow everyone, the message stream will inundate you.

In Twitter’s early days, I said I could keep up with maybe 400. Only after several years did I gradually increase that number, and now I can deal with about a thousand accounts quite well. I don’t really think it’s possible to read the tweets of a much larger number that you follow–not if you have anything else to do in your life. You can of course mute accounts that are uninteresting, but then what’s the point of following them?

Have you received bulletins from government or official rulings that you couldn’t understand without help? Did you have to phone customer service and suffer through long hold times because their online instructions were useless? Did you need to ask a lawyer for advice on filling out a permit application? Send that counterproductive language to the Jargon Contest; it could be chosen as Jargon of the Year during the FCG forum on June 7th. The contest is playful and its purpose is to pay attention to public sector language. The law requires authorities to use clear and comprehensible language. The Language Police have taken the task of monitoring compliance of this often violated statute. Please work with us and send your nominees by the end of May. You can submit them by e-mail at info@ yksityityinenkielitoimisto.net or share them on the Language police Twitter or Facebook site. Happy jargon hunting!

I’m more enthusiastic about Snapchat than about Instagram. I like the speed and conciseness of snap picture messages. The disadvantage is the loose video talk that bores people in the same way as in vlogs. Snaps are, however, shorter and less tedious.

I’ve been following snaps to see what workplaces can do with them. Few organizations currently use Snapchat; those who do, don’t post often. The most enthusiastic snappers are TV and radio celebrities such as Arman Alizad who market their own shows. But who wants to follow a stream of ads?

The public sector offers some good examples: the Finnish Tax Administration uses Snapchat to give concise instructions and to translate tax terms into plain language. The European Parliament, for its part, uses its trainees from all over the world to describe its work in a light but factual way.

However, the most interesting of all have been snaps created by Lööppi, an association of journalism students at the University of Jyväskylä. Students from around the world take turns sharing their snaps. You get reports from Melbourne, Spokane, Groningen, and elsewhere. The snaps combine worthwhile content with personal viewpoints.

I’ve given thought to the merits of open versus private sharing of snaps. Private messages work well in this medium; success with open content requires additional work for the person snapping, and the actual benefits can be minimal. As with other social media, it’s not enough just to be on Snapchat; you need to have a purpose, and you need to plan your approach.

As a language person I have not been too inspired by Instagram. I’ve set up an account a few times, and in recent months I’ve actively updated it and studied how others are using the service.

The channel seems best suited to visual art professionals: museums, artists, and photographers. For organizations, Instagram mainly offers an advertising channel with little payoff for those who follow. As for people who blog professionally about things like food, lifestyle, fashion and travel, their Instagram activity is mostly a rehash of what’s already on their blog.

Experts and scientists clearly have difficulty in aligning content: images in their stream can come from dissertations, articles, seminars and lectures, lacking visual impact and relevance. There are some exceptions – for example, Linda Fitzharris, who illustrates medical history in an interesting way. Authors seem to have the same problem as experts: their images tend predictably toward bookshelves, the covers of books they’ve read or written, and selfies.

One of the smartest users of Instragram is Clicksaver (”Klikinsäästäjä” in Finnish), which makes fun of clickbait sites by posting their headlines and giving away the rarely-surprising secret with wry comments. This short-form mockery works well in this channel. Like those professional bloggers, though, Clicksaver publishes its material elsewhere, like Facebook and Twitter, and so if you follow them on multiple sites you’ll get all the repetition you can stand.

Snarky people say that picture-sharing services are for the illiterate. While I don’t want to take so strong a stand, I do think that for people who work mainly with words, Twitter for example is a better fit than Instagram. CMIIW (correct me if I’m wrong).

The Finnish municipal elections have taken place and the results are already available. For an independent voter like me, selecting a candidate and a party is an onerous task.

Voters received information through TV debates, voting-guide applications, and also by online videos from the candidates. However, one problem with TV debates is an overemphasis on general policy. National party leaders with their long experience fill the debate with abstract political phrases. It can be a long journey to the specifics of local municipal concerns.

What about the voting-guide applications? Many issues are such that it’s difficult for a layman to make a solid choice, because you are not familiar with the details. Your choices are therefore often cautious, and the candidates that the app proposes are all middle-of-the-road. I feel I needed more filters: age, sex, education, occupation, and also the ability to select or ignore certain options. As I explored the suggested candidates, I found important information that the app’s original questions hadn’t asked. I ended up eliminating people one by one.

My final effort was watching all 245 videos from candidates for the Tampere city council’s 67 seats. Regardless of party, most of them wanted to eliminate unemployment, take care of children and young people, fix elderly issues and support enterprises. They promised to protect the environment, support culture, improve the services, and listen to local residents. The videos failed to provide any significant difference between the candidates.

I was still undecided as I entered the voting booth, but even a wrong choice is not fatal. A single candidate has limited opportunities to influence outcomes for good or bad. Numerous real-life issues and interests define decision-making in practise.