Some grumps about Modern English Usage

I was precociously a bit grumpy, in fact I think I was grumpy before I could walk, but there's no doubt about my status now: I'm officially “a grumpy old man”. Once you get past seventy years old you’re allowed to be as grumpy as you like, which is one of the few good things to be said for it. I'm particularly keen these days to nurture my grumpiness by moaning about the appalling decline in the use of the English language. Every day (or "on a daily basis” as they say) I see examples of awful English which, if it had more strength, would make my hair stand on end. This morning, after I’d eventually found my glasses, taken my daily pile of pills, put my slippers on the wrong feet, huffed and puffed my way down the stairs, and finally sat down in the kitchen with that loud, satisfied grunt old people make when they abandon themselves to gravity and land successfully in the middle of a chair, I listened to the BBC Radio news programme “Today”. Here are some of the things I heard people say:

1.?????? Interviewer:?What are the main findings? Expert: So basically we found .......

2.????? We’re reaching out to all those who have been impacted by the short fall.

3.????? I can’t have closure until the guilty men are locked up.

4.????? Interviewer: Did you see the accident??Witness: So I was standing there, ......

5.????? Well, it is what it is.

6.????? We’re taking their comments on board.

7.????? Interviewer:?Good game!?Captain: So it was a really hard match and .......

8.???? We’re not envisaging any major changes going forward.

9.????? We’re worried about Trump's plans for outreach.

10.? He’ll have to hit the ground running .

11.?? His performance was what can only be described as brilliant.

12.? There was a palpable sense of relief when he resigned.

13.? Since time immemorial we have kept dogs as pets.

14.? The full extent of the damage remains to be seen.

15.? There’s been a paradigm shift in customer service.

16.? The situation is fluid.

17.?? At set point he really committed to a hard passing shot.

18.? The attack was a victory for terror.

If I had more time (it’s a myth, by the way, that we oldies have nothing to do; apart from the fact that whatever we do takes so much longer, there are just so many complaints you can make, and medical appointments you can keep, in a single day) ... Where were we? That’s another sign (or “significant trait” as they say) of old age: you forget what you’re doing – which adds to the time it takes to do it, of course.?If I had more time, I’d sort the 18 items?above into carefully-considered categories and then spin some well-crafted yarn that would make compelling sense of it all.?Trouble is, my younger, sprightlier wife is going hang-gliding this afternoon, and she needs my help. I say “help”; actually, all I have to do is stand in the field she plans to land in and phone our neighbour, who has a tractor, if she crashes into the woods nearby. Anyway, I only have a couple of hours to talk about the list, and time (which marches on, waits for no-one,?and is certainly not on my side) is, as they say, a limited resource going forward.

We can start with that one:?going forward. ?In the quotes above, the going forward bit adds nothing, and neither would moving forwards or other variations. So the best remedy is to simply leave out the phrase, or otherwise say from now on, or simply in future. The culprit here, is, of course, management speak, which has penetrated most parts of public language, and which John Humphries (former, grumpy presenter of the “Today” programme) called “a loathsome serpent crawling into our bed at night and choking the life out of our language”. ?Management speak tries to sound important, but actually reduces language to a “debased, depleted sludge” as Don Watson, in his wonderful book Death Sentence calls it. Usually, it’s just annoying mumbo-jumbo (actioning deliverables by using blue sky thinking to build on best practice, for example), but sometimes its obscurantism is a deliberate attempt to conceal the truth. In the Mission Statements?of?so many?companies’ core beliefs and values,?“What we Stand For” is actually a reliable indication of?what the company never does.?Then there’s the more sinister Orwellian “double speak” that both dehumanises and seeks to control. Don Watson gives this example of judging an employee’s performance: “The role of the corporate centre is to worry?about talent and how people do, relative to each other. Workers build a set of intangibles around who they are. If they are not appreciated for their value-added, they will go somewhere else. It’s surely every worker’s dream to be appreciated for their value-added.

In my collection of quotes from the Today programme,?Items 2,6,8,9, and 10 are examples of management speak, and one can detect its influence in a few others in the list too. They’re?objectionable to grumpy old people like me not so much because they’re pompous and/or insincere, but because they lack clarity and precision. What does it mean to say that you’ve “taken on board” the criticisms or recommendations of a report? That you’ve understood them? Agreed with them? Heeded them? Accepted them? ?I think its real illocutionary force is to kick the can down the road. And what does “reaching out” entail? Making a public appeal to? Contacting by phone? Going round and knocking on the door? Inviting to participate? ?Again, one gets the strong impression that those who are being reached out to are unlikely to see much improvement in their situations.

Item 17, "At set point he really committed to a hard passing shot", is an example of management speak spilling over to affect other areas, in this case sports commentary. To paraphrase Watson,?just as a parrot might say “Where’s my other sock?”, as if socks mattered to a bird, tennis players are now expected to show commitment and to be accountable, as if they were global corporations.

The other item connected to sport is Item 11, the journalistic favourite: "His performance was what can only be described as brilliant". Obviously "brilliant" isn't the only way to describe anything, it's just that the journalist didn't have the time or the wit to find a more suitable adjective. This in turn is connected to Item 16, where “The situation is fluid” is code for “I've?no idea what's?going on”,?and to Item 12, where “a palpable sense of relief” is not, in fact, palpable.

A lot of the other items are clichés, dead bits of language which have been worn out by too much use. They just don’t convey much anymore. I'm particularly sorry that?"paradigm" has suffered this fate.

Items 1,4, and 7 are of the now ubiquitous “So”, usually found at the start of the utterance, and used like “Well”, or “Um”. I find it very annoying, but while I’m not prepared to take the oft-offered advice to “just get over it”, I recognise that this is?no more than me being an old grump. The same goes for the tendency to use nouns as verbs. "Impact" is now firmly established as a verb; everybody with any?business credibility is leveraging and actioning;?in our field, Hugh Dellar (always in the vanguard) talked of grammaring years ago, and now, if you’re cool, you’re busy translanguaging with your students. I’m sure you have your own list of peeves. The older you are, the longer it's?likely to be.

Finally, there’s Item 3: “I can’t get closure until the guilty men are locked up”. I wonder if the locked up bit owes anything to the Trump campaign against Hilary Clinton. In any case, what this utterance illustrates is the widespread sense of entitlement?observed in our society today.?These days,?there is a growing belief, as Watson puts it, that no mistake, inadequacy or failure should be accepted as a normal part of life: someone or some human process is to blame, and without blame, there can be no closure. Getting?closure is already a cliché; but given the amount of litigation flying around these days, where people try to get?compensation from those they?blame for what happened to them, it’s fast becoming associated with insincere greed.

OMG, is that the time? Before I go out, I have to find the car keys (putting things in their "usual place" ceased to work years ago); send off this letter to the local town council complaining about the use of motorised scooters in the village; make an appointment with an optician (I can’t see the ball in the TV coverage of golf tournaments, even when I sit with my nose pressed to the 60 inch screen); and fix the plug on my electric blanket (well it's either that or a hot water bottle).?Now, where can those car keys be? I’ll start with the fridge. ?