thedanglingmodifier.co.uk

Yesterday I sat on the bus next to woman who was reading some course notes on How to write formal English. I had to restrain myself from snatching the papers off her and jumping on them.

As the bus chugged gently through the choked up streets of South London, I weighed up the options in my mind. I could ask her if she was doing a course and steer the conversation to find out if my suspicions were correct – that there’s a course somewhere teaching formal business English.

I could ask how she would feel if she got a letter including all the words on one of the so-called ‘resources’. I could find out why she was doing it, what had motivated her. I could find out where she worked, follow her from her workplace to the course, track down the tutor….

But I digress. My point is that this appears to be an unwinnable battle. This is the language Bush and Blair used when they talked about invading Iraq. I can’t tell you how much copy I’ve edited since 2003 that concerns itself with winning the “hearts and minds” of staff, residents, clients or whoever. This language isn’t appropriate for workforce reorganisation and resident satisfaction. What’s next? Shock and awe in customer services?

Another inappropriate, but less politically contentious, metaphor is much more common, and widely accepted. In the world of work we share a general – if subconscious – obsession with travel.

What exactly is an ‘improvement journey’? Surely it is nothing more than an ugly metaphor for progress.

But the metaphor is more popular than the very word that would say what we mean. Reports “signal the direction”. Ministers “launch” initiatives, so what choice do we have but to “embark” on yet another improvement journey – even if the whole thing is vague and nonsensical.

Could it be ‘them’ again, those others who invented the language of the trading floors, the conspirators who are secretly laughing at editorial staff everywhere?

Are they trying to fool us by talking about the hum-drum progress of our working lives as if it were an adventure? After all, many of the greatest stories ever told are tales of voyages.

But in these stories there is usually a return element – the traveller comes back to tell the tale. Will a company that has spent 125 years on its “continuous improvement journey” ever want to return to the point where it was shit? No. It’s a rubbish metaphor.

And don’t think that the journey has to stop with improvement. Oh no! Come off at the next exit and stop for a moment at the ‘knowledge café’? You can study the ‘road-map’ and discuss your ‘direction of travel’ over a coffee with a ‘critical friend’. Then off you go again – out onto the open road – only this time it’s a ‘knowledge journey’ you’re taking.

Odysseus encounters a Cyclops. Gulliver is tied down by tiny people, but the most exciting thing that you’re going to meet, lowly office worker, is a ‘barrier’.

Now we’re back to the language of, well, not so much war as civil unrest – rioters turning over cars in Brixton and Toxteth, making ‘barriers’.

It’s all so hideous. Is it any wonder that business people are obsessed by the language of getting away from it all?

I’m beginning to think it’s not the language. It’s me. I am stupid.

There are certain simple things I want to do on this blog. I want to make the comments section bigger, so that more of my readers can tell me I’m wrong. I want people to be able to subscribe for e-alerts or something, to let them know when the dangling modifier is updated. I want to do things that keep people coming back. I want to rule the so-called ‘blogosphere’.

But what happens when I try to do these things? I find myself floating around in cyberspace, that’s what.

Not floating in that nice spacy way you get in dreams, where you drift along on the clouds until you want to come back down to earth. Where you float through the windows of someone’s house. No, this is the horrible uncontrolled floating where you bang into things and hurt yourself.

So, if I put ‘comment box’ into the search box on WordPress I get:

“cforms II is the most customizable, flexible & powerful ajax supporting contact form plugin”

And further down the page, another ‘plug-in’:

“AJAXed Wordpress (aWP) is an extremely powerful plugin that harnesses the power of AJAX and Wordpress to improve the user experience.”

Amazing! Or so I think until I realise that they don’t mean the household cleaner. These words are slicing through my mind, scratching on my brain like skates on ice.

What can I do? I’m so confused I end up having to turn to geeks. They smile knowingly, push their glasses up their noses and grin. I have asked several for help – I don’t want to wear any friendships too thin – and there is a moment with all of them where I can see they are enjoying the power, the knowledge that they can help, that I am at their mercy.

Of course I resent that. What self-respecting confused person wouldn’t resent that? By not knowing this stuff, by not being able to follow descriptions like:

“Increases Wordpress’ default search functionality through an options panel”

I am giving them the opportunity to smirk, call me names – names I’ve never come across before, like ‘blog tart’.

One of them even tells me I don’t need e-alerts, because there’s an RSS feed on my blog. I’m supposed to know about this web 2.0 malarkey, so I pretend to understand and slink off to see if I can get that working by myself.

Another one says something about folksonomy. Folksonomy? What sort of a word is that? Hippies, guitars, bandannas and beach fires spring to mind. Come on every body and sing. And when I ask what that is, he says:

“You should know. You bloggers invented it.”

Me! Me? I would never invent a word like that. Never. But I don’t show my dismay. Instead I scuttle off to find out what it means.

Thank God for wikipedia – at least I know what a wiki is. It turns out that ‘folksonomy’:

“describes the bottom-up classification systems that emerge from social tagging”.

So there we are then.

Like most people, I was an impressionable child. And like most people, I believed what my teachers told me.

We’ve all been there, although some of us have probably tried harder to bury the memories. But I’m sure we all remember fighting off sleep in over-heated classrooms, the heating on in summer, the sour milk at break, the windows painted with flowers.

I should have known the teachers were not to be trusted, the way they painted windows with such wild abandon. They said it was all right as long as you used poster paint.

And then they told me to avoid the word got. They said it was an ugly word.

“Listen to it!”

They kept repeating it, exaggerating the guttural sound of got.

Decades later and I know perfectly reasonable, sane people, who are still have issues with the word got. Some of them even work as writers and editors. They argue with me, but I argue back.

“How would the Dutch cope,” I ask them, “if they were taught that guttural words sounded ugly?”

But people don’t listen. They carry on retaining, obtaining, gaining, purveying, earning, garnering, receiving, even mining and harvesting, but never really getting the point.

These people – wonderful people who I respect in so many ways – seem to have been tainted, even ruined by their attentiveness at primary school.

And now some of them work in education. Completing the circle, they tell our children that the word got is ugly. They will go to any length to avoid it, even when trying to aide the involvement of parents in the wellbeing of their children. (They are still too damaged to simply get parents involved.)

I don’t know why I’m different. May be I was just one of the lucky ones – I sat by the radiator and couldn’t stay awake.

And I have my mother to thank even if the lesson was hard to learn. Painting on the sitting room windows may have got me into big trouble, but it taught me to question those teachers.

Somebody left a comment on my blog about “people talking shit”. Of course, people do talk shit, but the real problem is that people believe the shit. They even pay vast sums of money for the privilege of wading through pages of the stuff.

No one profits more from people believing shit than management consultants. They’re so good at talking and believing in their own brown stuff, they can easily convince other people to wallow in it too. Tony Blair practically bathed in it, spent millions of taxpayers money on it – although not as many millions as his successor has spent on the banks.

There’s this idea isn’t there, that the private sector can show the dusty old public sector a thing or two about efficiency. So in come the management consultants with their ‘improvement levers’.

Yes, I said ‘improvement levers’ – what the ‘Sun’ newspaper once defined as:

“using tools to get the job done”.

But, if you want to know what ‘improvement levers’ really are, take a look at Ernst & Young’s ‘Five Lever Advantage’.

Ernst & Young tell us that the first of five ‘improvement levers’ is ’strategic direction’. This includes assessing:

“the feasibility of leveraging on existing opportunities and performance…”

In other words working out how to make the most of existing opportunities and build on what your business is doing well. Surely if you can’t work that out, you shouldn’t be running a business?

The next ‘improvement lever’ is ‘performance management’. Ernst & Young can help you, the client:

“in the translation of corporate strategies into tangible objectives, supported by a set of balanced measures that align across the organisation”.

What sort of corporate strategy doesn’t already have objectives? Are we to assume from this that big business is being run by a bunch of clueless idiots who don’t know where to start?

And how is an objective ever ‘tangible’? If it’s ‘tangible’, that means you can touch it. They mean ‘achievable’ but I bet whoever wrote this thought ‘tangible’ sounded cleverer because it’s more obscure.

Then we have an expression that you find all too often in business and government writing: ‘align across the organisation’. What they mean is that they will introduce the ‘balanced measures’ in every part of the organisation.

And what are the measures balanced by anyway? Each other? Or do they mean that the measures are in touch with their inner selves? That they won’t just fly off the handle or lose it at some point when the office is busy.

Next we come to “People Organisation & Change”, where the first so-called sentence in this paragraph is not a grammatical sentence. So among the elements that their “comprehensive solutions encompass” don’t expect to find basic English.

Oh dear and the paragraph about ‘Process’ starts with a non-sentence too. You’d think that wealthy corporates like Ernst & Young could afford twenty quid an hour to employ a proof-reader, but presumably this is one of the “transformation interventions for significant process improvements” that they can’t “analyse, design, deliver and implement”.

Either that or they really don’t expect anyone to bother reading this far down the page. I wouldn’t have read it all myself if I didn’t want to pull it apart. And even I’m bored by the last paragraph on technology – more leveraging and non-sentences – although I can’t help but wonder what a “technology imperative” is.

The problem with plain English, is that it’s difficult to express in plain English, how totally exasperating the lack of plain English really is.

I am an editor who works for the government. I won’t say which part of the government, but I will say that I have to read and edit loads of guff that comes out of government departments. And I am supposed to understand this stuff.

I’ve worked in business too – and it’s the same thing. As if the world has been taken over by lawyers and marketing executives, so that it swings from over-formal, never-ending sentences that leave you gasping, then swipes you round the head with a cheesy tagline, or a corporate logo converted into a meaningless, but supposedly-catchy, acronym like “eNGaGe” or “SHOUT!”.

I have decided to do what any rational neurotic in the modern world would do. I have turned to the internet. I have searched and searched for someone who might understand what I am going through, but nothing.

My desperation is turning to bitterness. Now I must tap out the frustrations that have lurked in the most repressed corners of my mind for all these years. I am joining the millions who write blogs so that I can function, so that I can off-load my dark thoughts. The internet is the perfect place for this – a virtual sewer for all the effluent that spews out of the human mind.

Some say I wouldn’t mind the language so much if I didn’t have to work with it all the time. They tell me I need a change of career – suggest that I work with numbers or animals.

But I think they’re missing the point. What if it’s a conspiracy? What if ‘those others’ are secretly laughing at editorial staff everywhere? Laughing at our efforts to make government reports and financial documents even halfway readable? What if they don’t want us to understand?

Call me paranoid, but look at what’s been going on over the past few weeks. The world has gone crazy – there’s been talk about Armageddon and headlines about ‘carnage’ and ‘bloodbaths’ in the City.

The whole world’s been trying to work out what financial terms actually mean. First it was ‘shorting’, an expression that sounded painful and turned out to mean ‘short-selling’, which was just as obscure. Some said it was about betting on shares going up and down. Others said it was something to do with derivatives. Derivatives of what? Derivatives of futures. Eh? How can anything be derived from the future? People having conversations like this in pubs up and down the country – all over the world in fact – except that in other countries they have their own nonsensical jargon in their own languages.

Then, after a few weeks of the ‘Credit Crunch’– just when you thought you were beginning to get your head round what they were actually talking about – someone comes up with ‘credit default swaps‘.

Go on, click on that link and find out what a ‘credit default swap’ is – if you think you’re hard enough.