Between you and I and bad grammar
John Humphrys gets really riled up about bad English, and makes a lot of good points, and a few I think aren't that extreme (but what do I know?). He also places the blame where it belongs:
Politicians have a lot to answer for, but the real villains are business people. Management speak has been infiltrated into our lives, a loathsome serpent crawling into our bed at night and choking the life out of our language. It is an outrage that the phrase "human resources" was not strangled at birth. I hate it for its ugliness and its sloppiness. A moment's thought tells you that "resources" are exploited, used up, squeezed for every last drop of value and then replaced. Are we really meant to regard human beings in that light? It seems we are.
Less offensive, but equally dreary, is all the mumbo-jumbo surrounding "delivering objectives" by "thinking outside the box" or "stretching the envelope" by "building on best practice". What does it all mean? I doubt that anyone really knows, least of all the people who use it. They tend to be middle managers striving to impress their bosses or, possibly, each other. The people at the top, in my experience, tend to communicate clearly. Maybe that's why they made it to the top in the first place. Lazy use of language suggests lazy thinking.
He blames the right people: Business people, especially under influence by consultants, hired goons (sic!) trying to sell their latest psychopop snakeoil, replacing good old fashioned critical thought with mere slogans.
This brings me over to my own pet hate words:
proactive: whoever coined this monstrosity should be strangled at birth
paradigm: Kuhn may have meant it well, but he botchered it, and the word was taken over by radical postmodernists, and again by marketdroids, and thus rendered useless. I hereby declare that 'paradigm' only means a pattern of grammatical forms of a word. Nothing else.
empowerment: just a plain ugly word.
2:26:29 AM 
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