Granularity
The Nitty-Gritty About This Particulate of Speech

By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 7, 2007

There's that word again: granularity.

It's a mouthful of a term used by guys like Army Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq; retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey; and White House press secretary Tony Snow.

Responding recently to a question about potential sectarian violence in Iraq if U.S. forces withdraw, Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee, "It's hard from this distance . . . to get a real feel, or the real granularity of what's going on."

On "NBC Nightly News," McCaffrey said that sending more troops on a mission to Iraq "to get down to detailed granularity to fight a counterinsurgency battle in a city of 6 million Arabs who are murdering each other . . . is a fool's errand."

And talking about the inability to definitively link Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Snow said in an autumnal news conference, "We just don't have that kind of granularity in terms of the relationship."

Lately, people have been invoking the word to mean specificity. Certain things, such as the administration's vision for the future of Iraq, lack granularity. Newlyweds' dreams, psychic-network predictions and late-night kitchen-table get-rich-quick schemes also suffer from granularity deprivation.

Mike Mills, writing in Congressional Quarterly about the U.S. health care system's collection of personal medical information, notes that "sometimes the newer standard appears to take granularity to an extreme."

So, specifically, what exactly are we talking about?

"When I wrote that particular column," Mills says in an e-mail, "I remember hesitating before using the word, knowing at least subconsciously that it has now become jargon for 'detail.' "

In other words, "granularity" is a popular word for the "nitty-gritty." But it's not so nitty, not quite as gritty. It's about texture. Concreteness.

The word has migrated from science to business and now to politics and popular parlance. Mills, a journalist who spent several years in the overdrive world of dot-com commerce, says that "its modern origin as a technical term comes from the digital realm of computer graphics -- pixels."

The greater the number of pixels in an image, he points out, the greater the granularity, or clarity. The contemporary "use of this word seems to signal that the digital convergence has now crept into the human mind -- which techies call 'wetware.' "

When people try to describe abstract concepts, Mills says, they are now thinking and expressing themselves with digital imagery.

People have been using mechanical terms to describe concepts for a long while. For example, in the early 20th century, when Sigmund Freud wrote of pressure in the human brain and mental breakdowns, he used steam-engine metaphors.

Granularity "is a hot word," says Mike Agnes, editor in chief of Webster's New World dictionaries, in Cleveland. "It gives people a word they can use for a new way of looking at things -- whether it be engineering, business, politics -- and a new way of evaluating."

It means depth of detail, he says. "If you were a photographer or an astronomer, speaking of an image, you would use the term 'resolution.' "

All of a sudden, Agnes says, "granularity" is a buzzword.

"It's a very interesting concept, and if we've got a concept we need a word."

It's also a way of speaking about basic things without sounding simplistic.

Businesspeople have been using it for years. Now, like "synergy" and "drilling down," it's creeping into the general consciousness. When Santa Clara, Calif., Assistant City Manager Ron Garratt was asked earlier about a proposal for a new San Francisco 49ers stadium, he replied, "Until we drill down, until we see the granularity of this proposal and what the pieces of this plan are, we won't know from a staff perspective if the definition of 'no impact on general fund' will be met or not."

According to Webopedia, "granularity" is helpful when discussing systems: "The extent to which a system contains separate components (like granules). The more components in a system -- or the greater the granularity -- the more flexible it is."

Without granularity, it's hard to get traction.

Agnes says he would not hesitate to use the word in everyday discourse.

Words and phrases often move from the particular to the general. For instance, he has noticed a surge (ahem) in the use of "event horizon."

"Originally it was used in physics, particularly cosmology," Agnes says. Lately it's been popping up in the business world to denote the moment that marks the beginning of an inevitable process. It's the point of no return. "Once you reach an event horizon, the event itself is sure to follow," he says.

With granularity.