This is humbling.
I like to think of myself as being a pretty good writer, but novelist and Globe and Mail columnist Russell Smith has pricked my inner writer’s self-conscious paranoia with his smart column today on corporatespeak, or “crapspeak” as he puts it.
Even the headline “Going forward, rise up against crapspeak” leaves a mark. I’ve found myself using the “going forward” phrase often, and a few of the other offending turns of phrase Smith rants about.
Impassioned treatises about how business and political leaders pervert language to disguise their true meanings rather than to clarify their intent, come along every few weeks. And they go back decades if not centuries. George Orwell was writing about “double speak” in the 1940s, and the “big lie” was perfected (and decried) by totalitarian regimes in the 20s and 30s.
Smith also references another engaging rant on the topic, this one by Financial Times of London management columnist Lucy Kellaway in the BBC’s online magazine.
“The really lethal thing about the whole language of business,” Kellaway writes “is that it is so brainlessly upbeat. All the celebrating, the reaching out, the sharing, and the championing in fact grind one down. Several decades too late, it is as if business has caught up with the linguistic spirit of 1968. The hippies got over it, but businessmen are holding tight.”
I don’t disagree that companies and politicians try sometimes too hard to keep to the sunny side and underplay any negative consequences to their actions by being coy with language. But not always. It’s a complex and nuanced world out there, and sometimes you need to use complex and nuanced words to describe it.
And there’s nothing wrong in saying the same old things in new ways. For starters, this is the basis and rationale for most media. I happen to think, for example, that “granularity,” a common business buzz word that Smith professes is new to him, is actually pretty darn descriptive and evocative.
Besides, Laurie Anderson wasn’t the first to declare “language is a virus” that mutates and evolves with astonishing speed.
But maybe I’m just rationalizing here.
Anyway, a couple of good reads.
