Language Abuse
I’m a mass of ticks and pet peeves when it comes to English. I flinch whenever anyone says “irregardless”, break out in hives when people proclaim their intention to never “step foot” in some disagreeable establishment, and go into full anaphylactic shock whenever someone assures me that they “could care less” about something.
Which is funny, considering my profession. I often find myself in meetings where the English language is beaten, burned, shat upon, drawn-and-quartered, and finally twisted into a monstrous parody of itself, then slapped onto a powerpoint slide and projected onto a wall, where its shame and ignominy are visible to all.
Take the simple word “lesson”, for example. An innocuous, unobtrusive, friendly word, doing its noble duty by the language without calling too much attention to itself. Hardly a word you’d think one would need to abuse.
And yet many sectors of the business community have decided that there’s something about lessons they don’t very much like. Too simple, too mild, too old-guard. It doesn’t scream learning, does it? It doesn’t even whisper it. What it screams is “less”, and if there’s one thing business can’t abide, it’s less. If anything, it should be moresons.
And so legions of jabbering suits have begun to settle on a new, fresh-faced candidate: learnings. It’s got the word “learn” in it, which is key — there can be no question, for example, that last quarter’s disastrous performance didn’t result in learning. It says it right there, on the slide! Right there, under that somewhat alarming chart: The Learnings Table! Learnings were achieved, and future success is virtually guaranteed through the agency of those learnings.
I await with great anticipation the migration of this mutant horror from boardrooms and conference rooms into the general populace. I have no doubt that teachers will soon be crafting learnings plans, civic groups will be publishing “Learnings Learned” documents, and ne’er-do-wells will be taught their learnings. It’s just a matter of time.
This is part of a long-standing trend in the language, the transformation of unsuspecting parts of speech into verbs, usually through the imposition of grotesque suffixery — nailing an “ize” to the end of nouns, for example, and thus forcing them to drag monstrous semantic thoraxes behind them for the rest of their lives. Finalize is the classic example of this, but you’ve also got incentivize, monetize, productize — and many more, a whole rogue’s gallery of lexicographic hellspawn that are eating away at the language, like leprosy.
It could be worse, I suppose: we could be going the other way, from nouns to verbs. We could be staring down the maw of lessoning — as in, “I hope you’ve lessoninged your lesson, young man!”
It could still happen. I wouldn’t put it past these people.
Another outrage is the proliferation of “in terms of”. I have no problem with the phrase on its own, but it’s developed into a sort of verbal backspace key. People start down a sentence, realize that they talked themselves into a corner, and then — rather than doing the decent thing, and starting over — trot out “in terms of” to save the day. This particular sickness seems to have infected the ranks of the political punditry more than anyone else. Eg: “The perils of the liberal agenda — in terms of its tendency to place the welfare of people over the welfare of large corporations — cannot be overstated.” Or: “I just want to say that Ms Pelosi’s comments on the subject — in terms of their outrageousness — are outrageous.”
It’s the equivalent of driving down the wrong street, and, instead of turning around and going back to the intersection, taking a hard left and bumping over a sidewalk and through a couple of people’s lawns to get back on track. It’s inelegant, to say the least, and it fills me with dismay, in terms of its effect on the language, in terms of the bad precedent it sets, in terms of how people should talk.
Be gentle with your language, English-speakers. It’s the only one we’ve got.
6 Comments