Business jargon: Please mind your language

Language moves, we accept that: ‘Whan that aprill with his shoures soote, The droghte of march hath perced to the roote’ has stood the test of time as the opening lines to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales since 1400. But it doesn’t read that well now. 

Moving on though 

We are constantly adding new words and phrases into our vocabulary. Many people who speak English are resigned to a slow decline in linguistic purity. 

Paul Simon’s song Boy in the Bubble has the line ‘It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts.’ And most generations change their mother tongue. The word radiogram would have sounded as alien in the 1930s as it does now. 

A decade after the second world war, they were using new words like bobby sox, zoot suits, crew-cuts, teenager, rock 'n' roll and skiffle. In the sixties we sprinkled the language with groovy, far out, cool and ended nearly every sentence with ‘man.’ 

In 1971 technology began to affect our speech with the word fintech, a word I only learned how to use last Tuesday. Meme surprisingly appeared in 1976. 

Explosive technology 

Yuppy and voicemail appeared almost simultaneously in the early 1980s, perhaps one begat the other. This was the year before spreadsheet became a word we all understood. We ran ideas up the flagpole and did blue sky thinking. We used cell phones and ‘sick’ spread as slang for ‘excellent’, also in the 1980s. 

Erosive use of our mother tongue 

We’ve done some pretty horrible things to English; but now our very linguistic structure is under attack. Ladies and gentlemen please allow me to introduce our recent victim, the sentence. We have written-works from roughly 5500 years ago. The sentence is the basic building block of communication, there are billions of them in existence. Complete sentences are the first important achievement of toddlers.  

The construction of sentences is blindingly simple. In between the capital letter at the front and the full stop at the back you should include a subject, object and verb. 

There are plenty of other bits you can add, such as nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections from the salad bar of language. 

Here is a sentence (other sentences are available in this article): ‘I love you.’  

The magic of words is that they are both beautiful and dangerous at the same time. Sometimes the same words can convey different meanings: ‘She looked really hot and her dress was cool.’ 

The new generation has begun to methodically strip away the structure by removing the subject: ‘super excited to report.’ In fairness this works perfectly in imperative sentences like ‘sit down’ or ‘shut up’. 

We can now longer just have an emotion, it has to be super sized; ‘brilliant time, super stoked.’ Generation Z reaches for phrases that mean almost nothing and actually distort other words. ‘I’m reaching out, moving forward.’ Then add onboarding, niching, flavourful, side hustle, inspirational (for something that is not), insightful etc. 

Bent out of shape 

Language is a weapon or an inspiration. It can hurt or heal. Used properly it can soar, inspire and take the mind on a journey of emotional magnificence. Take ‘I had a dream’. Four simple words that changed the world forever. 

I recently read a report on LinkedIn, the home of largely witless prose: ‘At the drop of a hat the meeting turned.’ Those are words I know, but in that order they stun me. Another hopeful offered to ‘literally explode my business.’ Unaware if this was a sales inducement or a terrorist threat, I made my excuses and left, as Sun journalists used to say. 

Certain language trends spread like wildfire. The fairly innocuous phrase ‘all aspects of building work undertaken’ emblazons nearly every white van I ever see. If you take the word ‘solutions’ away from the English language about 70,000 companies would be nameless. I recently noticed ‘next level operational solutions.’ Like transport companies who ‘go the extra mile’, the phrases fail to attract me.  

Golden awards for language 

Some headlines and straplines change the world. Probably one of the most famous headlines ever was ‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster.’ But in my opinion the team who made the greatest linguistic change to the English language in the last few years is Dave Shelton and Liz Whiston of advertising agency HHCL. They coined the expression: 'it does exactly what it says on the tin.'  

Jonathon Savill has been a freelance features’ writer for 30 years. He truly believes that the pen is mightier than the sword, words brought his kids up and paid for his house. He’s never used a sword.