????最初，顛覆（disrupt）這個詞聽起來機智而且風趣。現在，它卻因過度使用而顯得乏味無比。同時，在這個過程中，這個詞也完全喪失了它所具有的力量。顛覆是個很好的詞，但由于人們嚴重濫用，它已經失去了原本的力量。我們已經忘了它的含義，盡管一些聰明人專門通過專欄文章來提醒我們，如今顛覆一個行業究竟意味著什么。

????我對這個詞的解釋平實（不夠伶俐）而簡短（不長）：顛覆就是分裂、破碎、成為碎片，它有害、令人不安、而且雜亂無章。

????更近一些時候，有人把這個詞用在了高深莫測的科技術語里，做出這個創舉的是哈佛商學院（Harvard Business School）教授克萊頓?克里斯滕森。他的著作《創新者悖論》（The Innovator's Dilemma）探討了各種各樣的“顛覆性創新”如何將各個行業鬧得天翻地覆（硅谷人士對這本書推崇備至）。當然這些大家都知道，但這一點還是值得重復一下：克里斯滕森在書中指出：顛覆，就算不是有害的，也必然是危險的。他的核心論點是企業陷入了自身經營模式的盲區，因而拒絕以擠占現有利潤空間為代價進行創新。

????按照定義，顛覆性創新的意思是和之前存在的東西，也就是它所顛覆的東西相比，它的質量不那么高。IBM的大型計算機在運算方面當然比第一代個人電腦強（就像個人電腦的運算能力超過第一代上網本或平板電腦一樣）；綜合型鋼鐵企業可能比微型鋼鐵廠加工的東西多；實體藥店的服務比郵購強。新的模式并不是對原有模式的改進，而是一種嶄新的方法，一種——嗯——突破。在這種突破的沖擊之下，原有的行為方式變得支離破碎。看到我所做的了嗎？甚至都不需要用一個被用濫了的詞。

????已經有人對今天的情況進行了精彩的預想：“在最糟糕的情況下，現代寫作的主要內容不再是根據含義來選擇詞匯，也不再是通過文字描繪來更清楚地釋義，而是把別人已經確定了次序的一些詞語串拼接在一起，并通過這種純粹的空話讓寫下來的語句看得過去。這種寫作方式的吸引人之處在于它很容易。”這是喬治?奧韋爾在1946年發表的論文《政治和英語》（Politics and the English Language）中所做的論述。如今的局面與他的描述別無二致。

????對參加顛覆大會（Disrupt Conferences，科技博客網站TechCrunch已經多次舉辦這項會議），討論顛覆性公共交通系統并就顛覆性公司撰寫新聞稿的人來說，我提出的問題是：考慮一下你們在顛覆什么，用什么樣的方式來顛覆，以及“顛覆”用在這里是否恰當。大多數情況下，它都沒有用對地方。（財富中文網）

????譯者：Charlie

????At a certain point -- somewhere on the way from sounding smart and buzzy to becoming an over-worn cliché -- a word loses its power. Disrupt is a good word we have mistreated terribly to the point it has become powerless. We've forgotten what it means, even as several smart people have written columns dedicated to reminding us about what it means, really, to disrupt an industry today.

????I will make this simple (not smart) and short (not long): a disruption is a breaking apart, or renting asunder, or falling to pieces. A disruption is a bad, unsettling, untidy thing.

????The more current use of the word, now warped into technobabble, was coined by Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, whose book, The Innovator's Dilemma, considers how various "disruptive innovations" have upended different industries. (The book is totemic to Silicon Valley cognoscenti.) Surely you know all this, but still it bears repeating: In Christensen's book, disruption is -- if not bad -- certainly dangerous. The core of his argument is that companies fall victim to the blind spots in their business models and refuse to innovate in ways that would cannibalize their existing profit streams.

????Disruptive innovation is, by definition, not as "high-quality" as what existed before, what it's disrupting. IBM's (IBM) mainframes were certainly better at computing than the first PCs (just as PCs had more processing power than the first netbooks or tablets); integrated steel mills could process more than mini-mills; and retail pharmacies offered better service than mail order. What each new model represented wasn't an improvement on what came before it, but an entirely new approach, a -- ahem --break. And the break tore asunder the old way of doing things. See what I did there? No need to even use an already overused word.

????Someone has already brilliantly considered how it is we ended up here: "Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy." That's George Orwell, in Politics and the English Language, an essay he published in 1946. True today as it was then.

????My challenge for the people who attend Disrupt conferences (TechCrunch runs several) and talk about disrupting public transportation systems and send press releases about disruptive companies, is to consider what it is you are breaking, and how you are breaking it, and if in fact "disrupt" is the right word to use. Most of the time, it isn't.