Every minute of every hour, armies of podcasters, gym bros, productivity hackers, body-image coaches, experts, “experts”, and sundry others exhort us to push ourselves ever higher in the pursuit of balance, clarity, time savings, a personal athletic record, or x pounds of body weight lost.
In the process, they hover at the mean, i.e. mediocre level of expression. They use the same language over and over – think catchy prepositional phrases such as ‘level up’ and ‘dial in’. Soon enough, that language loses the earthy texture that once made it attractive.
Bountiful semantic soil turns into paltry word dirt. At some point, these phrases become little more than influencer argot, audible from three trendy coffee-shop depths away.
Complimentary side of cringe with your morning macchiato, anyone?
As technology delivers ever more granular access to the settings and controls of our personal and professional routines – and even physical and mental realities – we require carefully considered expression to find meaning in this world, or at least to make sense of it. And yet we’ve allowed simplistic, lackluster phrases to cross over into mainstream usage.
Like stealthy zombie spies in a first-person shooter, they scampered across the border, hobble-crawling over from the province of jarheads and gearheads into the public domain. They ever hint at something nebulous in the minds of the people who use them and hear them, yet are never actually meaningful.
Since we’re not ones to mindlessly turn linguistic dials or sleep-walk up and down levels of meaning, let’s ‘level up’ the conversation and ‘dial in’ that effort by examining what’s at stake.
The combined provenance of ‘dial in’ is engineering/radio and military (as in tuning in to a radio frequency by working a dial,) but the actual usage is more at the speed of self-help and motivational – redolent of bro-talk – as in “turn the dial to 11”.
Coming at us courtesy of the gaming world, ‘level up’ has the whiff of a breezy, not-quite-fully-thought-through expectation that the end of every attempt/iteration/set/sortie automatically means progressing to the next stage, which leads to the binary, zero-sum mentality of “level up or else”. ‘Dial in’ adds a degree of detail, telling you how to get it done. ‘Dial in your effort’ has the sense of “‘lean on it’ or ‘lean into it’ and the results will be sure to appear”.
What to do if you are more of a straight shooter and less of a leaner, i.e. if you like things more plumb and less askew?
Alternatives to ‘dial in’ range from ‘focus’ (the verb) to ‘get it right’, with ‘fine-tune’ and ‘get your ducks in a row’ somewhere in the middle. You might try ‘put in the effort’ – or even ‘get it done’. As for other ways to say ‘level up’, you could start with ‘progress’ (the verb) and end with ‘kick it up a notch’, while including everything in between.
More suggestions, anyone?
