jointness, getting joint

[Benjamin Zimmer]

>From the American Forces Press Service:

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http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Mar2006/20060314_4486.html
'Jointness' Becomes Key Focus in Developing Military Capability
[...]
"We try to develop processes and get joint at the beginning," Raczjak
said. "We can do things a lot better if we do them together in a joint
context."
Joint Forces Command is working with the services, the Joint Staff and
the DoD staff to introduce "jointness" into the capability development
process.
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Interesting new Pentagon-speak here. Or not so new: Rumsfeld was
rambling on about "jointness" and "getting joint" back in 2001:

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http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2001/t07132001_t0711sd.html
Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with Group of Reporters, July 11, 2001
"You couple those things and then you say to yourself how do we
organize and arrange ourselves? Well, we do it by Services. How are we
doing? Then you say well what's all this talk about jointness, what's
all this talk about you should fight the way you train and train the
way you fight? If we don't fix that, if we don't get joint, if we
don't get arranged so that we can train the way we fight, the way
we'll have to fight."
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"Jointness" is surprisingly not in OED or the other dictionaries I
checked. Long before it became a military buzzword, "jointness" was
used by scholars, especially economists, in a variety of contexts. I
found it back to 1871 on Making of America:

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1871 William Elder _Questions of the Day_ 298 For this end they
require only so much of concurrence and combination as jointness of
their aggregate contributions affords. This is far short of such
agreement of action as jointness of industrial production demands; and
is just so much the more easy and practicable.

_Ibid._ 306 The factory employees, who were mainly interested in their
formation, had then but little experience of any sort of organization,
and but a vague and ineffective consciousness of their jointness of
interest, and still less notion of the mechanism required for the
advancement of their common welfare.

http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=AFP5624.0001.001
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--Ben Zimmer

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