Interpreting our age: The plus side of everything

By Jonathan Rechtman

Chinese officials coined a new turn of phrase to describe the importance and grandiosity of recent meetings between President Xi Jinping and President Trump in Beijing: it was a “State Visit-plus,” complete with a private presidential tour of the Forbidden City and ample quality time between the leaders and their families. 

During one of their informal meetings, President Trump reportedly shared with President Xi a video of his granddaughter speaking Mandarin, winning an “A-plus” from China's highest leader. 

Economic and cyber cooperation were both on the agenda during the more formal talks, and would have almost certainly included reference to China's vision for an “Internet-plus” economy. 

Almost on the same day, rapper-turned-tech-entrepreneur Will.i.am announced $117 million dollars in new funding for his new enterprise voice solution, I.am+, which is not to be confused with Echo Plus, the new consumer voice product released last month by Amazon. 

And of course a few days later Premier Li Keqiang attended the ASEAN Summit, where China is a regularly participant under the auspices of the ASEAN Plus Three framework. 

All of this may leave some casual observers a bit, well... non-plussed.

A staff member of a household appliance enterprise demonstrates how to control all the appliance of one household with a cellphone at China International Internet Plus Exposition in Foshan, south China's Guangdong Province, Sept. 10, 2015.[Photo: Xinhua]

When did our culture — and language — become so interested in addition? What do all of these plusses add up to? 

It's tempting to interpret this proliferation of plusses as a symptom of our generation's inexhaustible desire for “more”. We live in an age in which the growth imperative informs everything from national development policy and tech entrepreneurship to self-improvement and personal well-being. We enjoy unprecedented levels of prosperity, but whatever we have is never enough; social media reminds us that there's always a little extra, a little “plus,” just out of reach. 

It would be unfair, however, to judge the modern “plus” simply as a mark of contemporary ambition; this generalization risks conflating into a single paradigm what is actually a more nuanced range of rhetorical uses. 

The modern “plus” is most often used to represent two different and somewhat contradictory ideas: one implies linkage and connectivity; the other implies exclusivity and status. 

Phrases like “Internet-plus” remind us that in the modern world, nothing exists in a vacuum. The “Internet” is no longer a standalone concept; it is literally a network that connects all industries, all people, and - with the rise of IOT - all things. Internet-plus-healthcare, Internet-plus-manufacturing: the “plus” acts as a visual link between concepts, a symbolic bond between all economic and human activity.

The ASEAN-plus construction is a close cousin; the plus is a mark of inclusivity, extending the reach of the community beyond the immediate ASEAN nations and inviting participation from other major stakeholders in Asia: namely, China, Japan, and South Korea. In this context, the plus sign acts as a portal through which the association accesses external partners. 

But the “state visit-plus” is a very different kind of plus. It doesn’t link this state visit to anything else, and it certainly doesn't offer inclusivity or access; in fact, it has the opposite effect of differentiating this particular state visit apart from and above all others. Here, the plus sign is a visual honorific denoting exclusivity — it elevates the visit's status, just as an A+ distinguishes the very best students from the merely good students. 

Of course, as the plus grows more ubiquitous, its differentiating power is diluted, and still more pluses are needed to achieve the desired status. This has an inflationary effect; if there are too many A+ students, the really smart ones are soon pushed to achieve an A++ or an A+++. (Credit ratings work the same way).

Has the “plus” trend peaked, or is this just the beginning? It’s not hard to imagine the term popping up in other contexts down the road. 

For instance, a fairly common usage of “plus” that we haven’t yet seen in official rhetoric or branding is to indicate an advantage: “speaking Chinese is definitely a plus for job-seekers,” would be an apt example. When relations are strained, its good to stay focused on the plus side of things. 

And of course there is the original, arithmetical connotation of “plus” that often gets used to describe the power of synergies: partnerships in which one plus one yield a value greater than two. (And might such “addition” also be the solution to avoiding a “zero-sum game” between superpowers?)

The way we think is reflected in the words we use. The rising prominence of “plus” in our vocabulary shows an increasingly expansive view of the world: everywhere we see the opportunity to connect, to build, to add value, to offer a premium. 

Yes, we might get sick of it eventually. But the plus side is, there are always more new words to come. 

(Jonathan Rechtman is a Chinese-English diplomatic interpreter and the co-founder of Cadence Translate. )