Check the Gates!

In journalism, an essay or article that lays out events in a chronological, step-by-step order is called a “tick tock” piece.

“Gimme the tick tock,” newspaper editors will sometimes say when they want the first-this-happened, then-that-happened sequence of events.

It’s one of those terms of art you hear when you’re in a certain industry that you don’t hear when you’re in another. For instance, nobody in investment banking talks about looking for a good “act two button.” But then nobody in comedy writing ever tried to “strip a criss-cross swap-tion.”

Pretty much every business has a shorthand lingo designed to animate and color something basic.

In screenwriting, for instance, we say “hang a lantern” on something when we’re trying to get away with a plot contrivance or coincidence so unrealistic that the only way to make it work is to have one of the characters actually remark on its total unbelievability, which shines a light—or “hangs a lantern”—on it, and, somehow, makes it all seem less made up.

Show business generates these kinds of phrases all the time. A few years ago, people started talking about this “space” or that “space”— television networks would be said to be investing heavily in the “drama space” — which always made me think of an actual room filled with people behaving dramatically. The “streaming space” does that, too, but it’s a more unpleasant image.

And it’s not just the entertainment industry. I have a consultant friend who tells me that when they present options to their clients—options, naturally, that always require retaining the consultancy for further services—they present them as “MECE” (pronounced “mee-cee”) meaning “Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive.

“Are these options MECE?” I expect executives to be saying to their terrified underlings in the years to come, replacing “win win” and “disruptive” and “diverse” as adjectives of choice.

Many years ago, when then-Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg was leaving that studio to start up Dreamworks, he said something in an interview that was philosophical and deep thinking. The transition from one job to the next had been tumultuous, but “at the end of the day, what do you want your life to be about?”

That’s not an exact quote— Katzenberg is a famously eloquent guy, I’m sure he said it much better—but he did use the phrase “at the end of the day,” which was not, at that time, a phrase people used a lot.

A month later, it was a phrase people used pretty much hourly. “At the end of the day” was like the kale of phrases. It was nowhere and then, suddenly, it was everywhere. Once a phrase is introduced into the general social glossary, it gets passed around in emails and Zoom calls and casual conversations until everyone is using it.

Sort of like how in recent years everyone has been using “R nought” and “infected fatality rate” and “no fly zone” and “top attack” and “Crimea.” Suddenly, we’re all savvy insiders.

Even though we’re the exact same stupid that we were last week. Only now we have some cool lingo.

This kind of language lasts long after it ceases to mean anything. For instance, on a movie set, immediately after the director yells “Cut!” someone else yells, “Check the gates!”

The “gates” are—or used to be, before filmmaking went digital—the part of the camera where the film slides in front of the shutter. When you “check the gates,” what you’re looking for is something wrong, like a single hair or a speck of dust, that’s going to ruin the shot when the film is processed.

If the gates are okay, you can move on. If they’re not, you’ve got to reshoot the scene, because once you’ve moved on, there’s no going back.

These days, of course, there really isn’t a “gate.” There’s a chip, or a disk drive or something. But “Check the disk drive!” isn’t as romantic or atmospheric, so we stick to the old phrase because sounding cool is a lot more socially valuable than describing something accurately. A lot of us — especially those of us in the media business, in front or behind the camera — happily substitute knowing what we’re talking about with sounding like we know what we’re talking about. And at the end of the day, that’s something to hang a lantern on.