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10 ways to spot vocabulary bankruptcy
We all have our personal lists - of the zaniest/quirkiest/ funniest/craziest/smartest... We devote this page to them. This week, Tim Walmsley lists...
- By Ruqya Khan
- Published: 00:20 September 5, 2008
- Tim Walmsley is the regional director at Impact Porter Novelli.
- Image Credit:
Tim Walmsley is the regional director at Impact Porter Novelli.
Getting too clichéd Platitudes are the crime of speech without thought.
I advocate zero tolerance. A merest whiff – just one syllable – and the speaker should be clapped in leg-irons and thrown into the nearest oubliette. And anyone who says, "think outside the box" gets put in one.
Spiral conversations The banalities of traffic, real estate and oil prices, the heat, the heat, the heat… These topics are the common currency of a billion everyday conversations.
Speak with care Clichés vary by nationality and language, and so can be difficult to spot. Occasionally, you may even find other people's clichés charming. Handle with extreme
care at all times, since they can be distressingly circular. It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then, like most clichés, that cliché is untrue.
"Green" is the ‘big daddy' of all buzzwords: it's aligned throughout the UAE with a thousand paradigm shifts of perfectly leveraged synergies delivering a win-win for business and the environment. Even "green fatigue" has hit the ground running. Abandon hope all ye who think "green".
Mind your business language Whole essays have been written on the sudden rise and widespread misuse of business vogue phrases. A current favourite of senior execs worldwide is "going forward", simply meaning "in the future". What's wrong with simple?
Overworked adjectives In my line of work, the words "key" and "urgent" are banned. Offenders are kneecapped with blunt keyboards. Each word actually means its opposite. For "key" read secondary and irrelevant. "Urgent" is for tomorrow, or maybe the week after.
Normal is good Listen up programmers, doctors, engineers and, more recently, Olympic commentators. Khallas with the jargon! Talk normal. Know what
I mean? Nuff said.
Newspeak According to George Orwell, "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year is newspeak." Although writing an essay on totalitarian propaganda, he might just as well have been discussing the "news-speak" of bad journalists plaguing certain pages in certain newspapers. Improve your word power, my friends.
And on the subject of bad faith Let's have euthanasia for euphemisms, especially the most pernicious, bald variety.
Good bye "downsizing", hello
"layoffs". (Yikes, this could come back
to bite me).
Stretching the thought to distortion
Great piles of long words strung into endless phrases that spin into meaninglessness…
- As told to Ruqya Khan
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