A Certain Age

Are we discussing the sort of language, or the useage thereof,  up with which Winston Churchill would not put?

Howard

Edited By Howard Lewis on 11/03/2021 14:41:56

Yes.

Although that quote predates him, it shows how daft complaining about split-infinitives is.

.

Just returning to this one, Jon ... because you may like to try this game:

We [a small group drafting and negotiating contracts] used to set two endpoints, and then divide the continuum between them into as many increments as we could.

Using your reference to Love: Let’s assume that the endpoints of the analogue scale are ‘I Love You’ and ‘I Hate You’ ... Now see how many reasonable discrete increments you can devise between them.

Yes it’s a silly game, but when your job depends upon understanding the distinction between terms like ‘Best Endeavours’ and ‘Reasonable Endeavours’ ... it’s rather like Lion Cubs play-fighting to learn their hunting skills !!

MichaelG.

Oh, business "English" is a world of its own!

I appreciate terms like " best endeavours " and "reasonable endeavours" may have contractual or legal implications, but what if any meanings, purposes or indeed need, do these pretentious cliches really have:

world class

transformative (or its even worse manifestation, transformational)

exciting (often applied to a scheme to build as ugly a block of flats or waste-incinerator as possible in as attractive a location as possible)

mission statement (they were very fashionable for while... last Century)

going forward (when your entire speech has been in the future tense, about future policy)

roll out (I have seen a wonderful definition of that one)

identify a requirement for (why not just say, "need"?).

Or consider what this waffle, typical of the mission-statement fad, actually says; not what the Chief Cliché Officer would hope we read it as:

We aim to be a world-class provider of high-end logistics solutions to the discerning client.

Many of those phrases can be erased from a sentence without changing the meaning, but a huge improvement in readability - going forwards, solutions etc.

One company I worked for had a surplus of middle-managers with no real work to do, so we had a constant stream of stupid ideas, U-turns and appalling English. A few come to mind:

They were so susceptible to meaningless gibberish that we guaranteed to get it repeated back to us by the end of the week. Our record was the same afternoon

Our depot manager returned from a meeting/bollocking/indoctrination session at head office with some shiny new phrases stuffed into his tiny brain. Tony and I had very low tolerance for such things, so we handed round some Bullshit Bingo sheets before the meeting started. He'd used them all in under 10minutes, and that's how long the meeting lasted. The sulking went on a lot longer....

Tony cut another meeting short with the immortal phrase "If you empower me to do that, I'm going to punch you"

Some genius decided each department should write its own mission statement. There was a lot of moaning from everyone who had that dumped on them. I submitted "Arbeit macht frei" as ours, and the subject was never mentioned again.

Business English is almost an anti-language. Too often, its purpose is not to communicate but to obscure meaning and inflate importance so the speaker or writer appears to be doing something wonderful when they are not.

**LINK**

Here you go, seniors. It's not age that makes you forget, it's the bloody doorways! Science says so. So best stay in the shed and not pass through the doorway back inside if you want to remember what it is you need from inside.

The above entries remind me of an incident when all the L1 & L2 managers were given a booklet to read, after which a meeting with the L3 manager was called to discuss the contents.

The booklet was a mishmash of all the current "in" phrases and in some instances the sentences were incomplete. Before the meeting, I, and it had to be me, didn't it (!) started listing a number of these silly phrases and just for fun, I took one paragraph at random and rewrote it to about 3/4 of it's original length.

Come the day of the discussion meeting, and I started complaining about and giving examples of this nonsense. You can I imagine my shock when I, a L1. manager, realised that the L.3 manager was diligently writing down all my comments! We never heard anything else about that document.

And no, I don't think it affected my promotional prospects which were already nil.

Regards,

Peter G. Shaw

Doorways?

You have to be careful with doors - allegedly someone once opened a wardrobe door and was confronted with an Arctic Lion.

There is a simple answer to returning from shed to house door only to have forgotten in the time it takes to walk u[p the garden, what is was you went for... Run faster.

====

Years back I was a low-level Scientific Civil Service lab assistant, when the Govt. Of The Day decided it would fatten us as what it pompously called a "Next Steps Agency" - steps to being flogged off cheap, it later tranpsired.

During these fatted-calf phases the management tripped over some new rhubarb called TQP. I think it stood for Totally Questionable Procedures, but it might officially have been Total Quality Practices.

Dutifully we filed into a lecture-room, each collecting a grandly uninformative glossy leaflet telling us how brilliant TQP is, that it would give us more initiative, control over our work, blah, blah... but not how. The "home-made" video was so cheesy it ought be a First-Year Media-Studies example of how not to make promotional videos.

We returned to out labs or offices asking each other, "What the hell was all that about?" and agreeing it was rubbish anyway because we could only do the work we were given, by the established methods. The cynics (surely not) interpreted it as that if we did something particularly meritorious our senior managers could bask in their well-earned glory whilst if it all went pear-shaped, then by whose fault I wonder?

Nothing ever came of TQP.

A year later our one customer, our original Ministry, ordered us to adopt ISO9001

ISO9001 was all the rage at the time - one of the biggest scams going, I reckon! It did though, sink any remaining traces of TQP, because while TQP was nominally based on chimerical promises of initiative etc., ISO9001 is the opposite. It espouses rigid procedures and hierarchies in which bright ideas can be squashed with "Can't do that. Not in the Procedures".

It made us compile Work Instructions, Procedures or Guides for everything we did. The differences were in degrees of diktat and waffle, using pro-formas the management allegedly found in American business-school text-books.

Each WI pro-forma was about 10 pages of Blindingly-Obvious mixed with Blindingly-silly. Title, a Master-copy File-reference long enough for an MS_DOS command-line. A Contents Page, 'Metrics' (whatever they were, ignored anyway), 'Scope' (the intended users), and a so-called "Process-Diagram" of 3 boxes labelled "Input - Process - Output". Plus a few blank pages captioned "This page is intentionally blank" for reasons never known.

Ummm. I've forgotten something... Oh yes, the Instructions for the work itself. Ah - they were relegated to the end, as an Appendix! I kid you not.

Senior management thought that farrago The Correct Procedure. The external auditors eventually arrived, exclaimed, "What have you done?" and told the firm to ditch all the rubbish before giving us the vital certificate.

I was asked to prepare one WI for a piece of test-equipment in our lab. It amused me to use it as internal-auditor bait, suspended in full view from the test-rig. Our posse of internal auditors, no doubt all with pretty certificates saying " ---- has Successfully Completed the Introduction to ISO9001 Course", would come strutting round full of self-importance, clip-boards drawn like John Wayne with his revolvers. Keeping as far away as possible, I noticed they would look only at that Work Instruction's title and file-reference and tick its presence off on the script - and that was them 'appy. They were not interested in its worth as an operating-manual. Just as well, for it was worthless, because I'd no sooner written it than my manager rebuilt the device to perfom the same task in a very different way!

I amassed quite a few of those trade-course certificates - First-Aid, Overhead -Crane Operating, assorted MS software, Manual Handling, PA Testing, Legionella Awareness. They look ever so impressive until you think about what:

"______ has Successfully Completed the .... Course", and "Awareness",

actually say, and what they don't say!

Has anyone still got a copy of the "Management Sentence Compiler"?

Three columns of words where one word from each column, chosen at random, could be placed into order in a sentence which seemed to make sense, but actually conveyed almost nothing.

It was a splendid means of writing a wordy, but nonsense reply to almost anything.

An example of "blue sky" thinking no doubt!

Howard

.

I think I have, Howard ... or it may me the BS technical equivalent [which was similar, but with different words]
Unfortunately; at my age, I can’t remember where I ‘archived’ it.

MichaelG.

Here’s a modern equivalent from our friends in New Mills: **LINK**

http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/gobbledygook-generator.html

MichaelG.

Mind you ambiguity has it's uses. How about this one for when asked for a job referrence for someone you don't really think much of.

"You will be very fortunate if you get this person to work for you"

:O)

Martin

Thanks to t’internet ... here’s some history: **LINK**

http://www.copywriting-on-demand.com/buzzword-generator.html

MichaelG.

The government has been using it for their Covid policy and general slogans for at least a year

Aha! The SIMP principle is alive and well!

I don't know if the industry samizdat still exists in the way I recall it, but perhaps it has gone "on-line" (more jargon).

It used to circulate in printed forma, and thus I encountered SIMP, probably back in the 1980s when pretentious semi-literacy really started to replace genuine business terms in proper English.

Simplified Modular Prose [System]:

Four blocks lettered A-D, each of 10 numbered clauses stuffed with out-of-the-box, blue-skies piffle. Those in Block A started with a capital letter, those of A-C ended with a conjunction or preposition, those of D ended with a full-stop.

Create any random 4-digit number, and concatenate the so-numbered clauses in block order (e.g. A7, B3, C1, D10). Hence, a grammatically correct, very long, very flowery sentence to impress any modern business type without actually saying anything at all!

I can't help thinking some employer somewhere had unwittingly being paying somebody to dream it up in works time. It must have taken hours. Like all these samizdat circulars, it was real folk-art - anonymous, source unknown.

'

At one staff presentation the Human Resources manager, whom I always titled as Personnel Manager, used "going forward" so often - rather as a teenager uses "like" - that I stopped listening and pondered my forthcoming caving weekend.

'

My last employer was the UK arm of a major German company, and SIMP was noticeably absent. I think a lot of that was due to our Managing Director being a Dane - so had had to learn English to a high, formal level - and a professional engineer.

Before I retired, the Company spent a fortune on management consultants to devise and introduce new methods in New Product Introduction.

When, finally, we were called into a meeting room to be told that new method would entail weekly meetings of all parties involved, from Design through Development, Purchase, Production Engineering, Production and Quality.

Two of us more experienced Engineers, could hardly restrain our mirth as we were told about exactly the methods we had used for just that purpose! A few years before, I had introduced new products, on time and within budget, by using just those methods.

The King's New Clothes? Or does age breed cynicism?

Howard

Efficiency in the workplace is largely common sense. My son was pressured into having new smart meters fitted in his flat by his energy supplier and because it had to be done during the day, I was elected to flat sit for the visit. We had already decided that the afternoon slot would be best for me so I parked myself to await the engineer to arrive, anytime between noon and 4PM. Knock at the door at just after 3PM. The electricity meter was just in the entrance hall but when I told him that the gas meter was at the back, one floor down he said that because both meters had to communicate with each other using a wireless link, they had to be closer together. Just to be on the safe side he decided to fit some test gear to make sure and when I went out to show him the location there was a second engineer with his own large van waiting to start work.

When booking the appointment surely it would have been simple to ask a few questions relating to the meter location or at least send a rep along to check the location. Heaven knows the cost of sending two engineers and two vans.