And Another Thing

My secondary school English teachers [or readers of this blog] might take issue with this, but I've always had a fondness for the robustness and versatility of the English language. This probably stems from a love of reading instilled in me from an early age by my parents, who patiently read stories to my younger brother and me every night. My partner and I are currently trying to replicate this with our son - this seems to be working, but until he learns to read we can't be entirely sure.

Chris Morris's surreal fake news satire The Day Today first made me consciously aware that you didn't have to use conventional syntax to convey meaning, peppered as it was with made-up words and inventive hyphenations. Having thought about it since, I'd managed to gloss over numerous other instances of linguistic creativity in the meantime - Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, for example, or the devolved Aboriginal dialogue of Mad Max 3 [itself appropriated from Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker]. This same mercurial approach to language is apparent at one end of the scale in the curmudgeonly creativity of Charlie Brooker, and at the other in the linguistic silliness of Adam & Joe, while Stewart Lee exhibits a clear love of often slightly antiquated language in his hilariously convoluted and meandering narratives.

You don't have to be a writer, journalist or comedian, though, to use language in a creative way, and I harbour a deep-seated distaste for those whose vocabulary lacks at least some inclination toward the inventive. Nothing encapsulates the object of my loathing more perfectly than the narrow aspirations and barren bleakspeak of the archetypal middle manager. Entirely devoid of creativity, their ungainly conversation creaks and groans under the weight of terrible set phrases: "singing from the same hymn sheet", "run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes", the abhorrent "blue sky thinking".

Among other crimes against conversation:

"Thinking outside the box" Despite constantly boring people to death with various assertions to the effect that their wild intellects cannot be caged, middle managers are the squarest and most blinkered sort of person you are likely to encounter. They are about as likely to be struck by brain-fritzing inspiration as I am to win the lottery.

"Pushing the envelope" See above. You couldn't gather such a braying congregation of narrow-minded losers together under your own steam, but HR departments the length and breadth of the western world seem to do this as a matter of course. I would honestly rather buy and then fully honour a weekend ticket to a Star Trek convention than willingly spend any time with these people.

"It's not rocket science" AKA "It's not brain surgery". Combine to ephemerally amusing effect with "It's not rocket surgery".

"Let's touch base" Let's not.

These have all quite rightly - if somewhat more belatedly than any decent person would have liked - fallen out of favour over the last decade or so, even among the least imaginitive of managerial mudskippers. Unfortunately they've been superseded by a new wave of meaning-stripped verbal padding that can be heard on a daily basis in television and radio interviews with that other rightly derided group - politicians:

"Joined-up government" OK, this is a now out-of-use phrase bandied about by Tony Blair's lot in the heady early days of New Labour. Use of this phrase decreased with every war we blindly followed George Bush into, which may in retrospect prove to be the only good thing to have come out of those ill-considered politico-military debacles.

"It's a big ask" Only the bounder would consider 'ask' to be a noun. At a push I would accept that it's also a chain of pizza restaurants.

"Let's be quite clear" As if you needed to state that! No, no - much better to be unclear, surely? That's why we invited you on this nationally broadcast, publicly funded current affairs programme, so you could respond in a purposefully oblique manner.

"Going forward" Meaning "from now on". Are you H. G. Wells' The Time Traveller? Are you Doctor Who? Have you found some way to remove yourself from the unidirectional timestream, an act upon whose very feasibility even the most bleeding edge of theoretical physicists remain undecided, and somehow flit about like some twitchy, four-dimensional marmoset? HOW WOULD YOU GO ANY WAY OTHER THAN FORWARD, THEN?

I'm going for a lie down...