cookie’s Random Jottings
cookie’s Random Jottings
If you can walk with Kings and not lose the common touch… ah, Kipling – more about him in a subsequent blog. He makes exceedingly good cakes too.
So why am I quoting poetry to kick off a blog? Well, I think I finally find myself in a situation where I’m quite at home dealing with top academics, and yet feel just as comfortable chatting to workmen in the café in the mornings. (That I’m on first-name terms with all the café staff, and most of the punters now, tells you which little corner of my life remains to be sorted out). So folks, it’s time for another in an occasional series where I lament the decline of our beautiful language.
I’m well aware that our language is in a constant state of flux, and that my English is different from that of my grandparents. I’m also fairly confident that if my grandparents heard modern-day English, they’d be baffled by some of it. I can imagine my grandfather’s bemused expression if he heard someone say “…and I was like ‘Hello?’” I am a big fan of clarity in communication (but not brevity, some would say), so it irks me more than somewhat when I hear institutions like the BBC using ‘bad’ language.
Top of my cringe-list, and pretty ubiquitous these days, is the term ‘for free’. It irks me so much that I have, on occasion, not even bothered to look at what is supposedly being offered gratis. You cannot get something for free – you get it for nothing, you get it free, or you get it free of charge, but you never get it for free.
My ire rises every time I’m in a shop or restaurant and a punter says “Can I get…”. I fantasise about the day when I hear an exasperated waiter respond with “No Sir, I’ll get it for you – it’s what I’m paid for.”
Management-speak mystifies me. You’d think that people who find themselves perched on the rungs of the executive ladder would want to sound articulate and intelligent, but instead they choose to deal in euphemistic nonsense. I’m speaking of people who, despite their lofty positions, dare not say ‘problem’ or ‘breakdown’ and so replace them with ‘issue’ and ‘outage’. They never say ‘in future’ – that would be far too simple; instead they use the meaningless ‘going forward’, particularly after some monumental corporate balls-up. Things in their world aren’t affected, they’re ‘impacted’ (impact is a noun where I come from), and they work until ‘the close of play’. Well, it might be a game to them, but it’s a living to the rest of us. They can’t simply do something, they have to ‘action’ it (Oh look, another noun-as-verb abomination), and they look for ‘competencies’ rather than skills in their employees and contractors.
Saving the worst until last, they use the noun ‘leverage’ as a verb meaning to use or to exploit, and to add insult to injury, they choose to pronounce it with an American accent. I just don’t understand it. This nonsense doesn’t seem to me to serve any useful purpose. I suspect though that its roots lie in self-important managers attempting to disguise their ineptitude, although they would no doubt be ‘efforting’ to disguise it. “There’s no ‘I’ in team” they’ll say when delivering rallying speeches to their underlings. No, but there’s a definite ‘you’ in c*nt.
We all, it seems, use little ‘stocking-filler’ words and phrases, while having no conscious idea that we are saying them. This has become so prevalent among my school students that I now have a list of forbidden words in lessons. To make my pedantry more fun for all involved, it has evolved into a game of ‘Bad-word Hangman’. A line is added to the gallows for each peccadillo, the object being not to get hanged before the end of the lesson. Some examples of ‘bad’ words:
Like
Basically
Random (almost exclusively a public school stocking-filler)
Wait! (if I’d used an imperative to my teachers, I’d have been in trouble)
Can’t (unless qualified by the word ‘yet’)
I tend to listen to speech radio while driving, and have noticed that when politicians are being interviewed, or a phone-in caller puts forward a controversial view, they seem always to use the stocking-filler ‘you know’. It’s obvious that they have absolutely no idea that they are saying it. I’ve also noticed that the frequency of ‘you know’ seems to be in direct proportion to the preposterousness of their rhetoric.
Which reminds me… clarinet player Dick Laurie advocates the addition of a new punctuation mark to written English – the ‘prepostrophe’. This mark (I believe it is <<) should be used to warn the reader of impending absurdity.
And finally… the photo at the top of this piece is of a sign that appeared at the halls of learning recently. I think it’s aimed primarily at the builders currently working there, but as I’ve a reputation as a bit of a potty-mouth, I’ve been telling students the management put it by the entrance to remind me to rein it in a bit.
Also on the subject of foul language, the following dropped into my inbox this week. This piece is made all the more poignant for me as I once witnessed one of the protagonists cavorting awkwardly in front of a bandstand in a somewhat over-refreshed state.
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‘Til the next time…
Bad Language
Sunday, 11 May 2014