A teacher at my daughter's school has a signature, motto, or tag at the bottom of her emails:
Arranger, Ideation, Intellection, Learner, Responsibility
This appears to come from the Gallup (Clifton) StrengthsFinder, an inventory that is similar to all those other scientifically questionable categorizer that do more to allow us to label ourselves than do much of anything else. In some ways, they give us an excuse to explain our behavior: "I can see why I can't work well with you, I am a NFSP and a 9 while you're an INFJ and a 6." Of course, the main reason for their existence seems to be to make money for those who administer and score the inventories.
But let's ignore that for now. This post is really about the different labels themselves. I will not complain too much about a couple of words in there that are somewhat problematic for me personally, but I will question what appears to me to be a lack of parallelism. That said, it would be tough to write. All are nouns, which is often the first hurdle, so we cleared that. The first and fourth are identifiers that seem to identify the writer as an arranger and learner. Perhaps these are identities that we want our children to aspire to be. The second and third go well together, but do not seem to fit. They are qualities rather than identities. The last is also a quality. The problem is perhaps a deficiency of the English language. We do not have words that work well to capture these concepts. One stab might be:
Arranger, Ideator, Intellectual, Learner, Responsible Party
Ideator is not great, but it does seem to be in use for this exact sense: one who creates ideas. That last phrase is horrible, but there is apparently no good word for it, perhaps, except to rely on the poetic. During a brief Internet search, I've found several other people looking for a good single word for "the person who is responsible." While we have words for people who are responsible in a negative way, we do not seem to have a good, single word. Somewhat poetic words suggested on the web include catalyst and architect. I even came up with captain.
Arranger, Ideator, Intellectual, Learner, Architect
Bleh. This and catalyst capture the creative and operative nature of responsibility (i.e., people who do things are responsible doing what they do), but these words do not embody the concept of duty or onus, which is a key concept we are trying to latch onto when we use responsibility here.
So should we go the other way and approach things from qualities?
Arrangement, Ideas, Intelligence, Learning, Responsibility
That's just as bad, if not worse. Suggestions? I wonder if anyone who is more of an "expert" on the Clifton StregthsFinder might have some sort of insight into why the words seem to be all over the place.