Government fails when the words for offices and duties stop matching what their holders do, so ruling begins by correcting the names.
Asked in the Analects what he would do first if given charge of a state, Confucius answers that he would rectify the names: if names are not correct, language does not accord with the truth of things, and affairs cannot be carried to success. The claim is diagnostic rather than pedantic, that institutional decay shows first in vocabulary.
In practice
- A department calls a redundancy programme a restructure, and two years later cannot explain to a tribunal what the roles were.
- A firm that renames complaints as feedback stops counting them, and the count was what the board had been reading.