A few years ago I had to go to a ‘team-building away-day’. We all trooped into this conference room and helped ourselves to meagre cupfuls of cheap, weak coffee and miniature chocolate croissants. Then some guy in a loud silky shirt and a wacky tie introduced himself. He told us the day was going to be enormous fun (he turned out to be wrong about that) and then he started talking about “working smart”. › Continue reading
There are a lot of commentators around at the moment, blaming a lot of the world’s ills on ‘globalisation’. Perhaps they are right, but does it end there?
A few weeks’ ago, someone called Paolo left a comment on this blog which brought a new language called Globish to my attention. It just goes to show: just because an editor’s paranoid doesn’t mean that there isn’t a conspiracy to stop us all from understanding the words.
But then take a closer look at the Globish site. Globish turns out to be one man’s vision of the plainest English possible. › Continue reading
I have been trying to work out how to add a blogroll to this page. I thought that after nearly six months of blogging, the language would be familiar to me. Regular readers may recall the angst I suffered last time I tried to engage with the blogosphere. I thought things might be different now, but of course it was just self-delusion.
In government there are a few favourite metaphors that make little sense and I hate them. I suspect that the civil service uses them as much as possible, peppering them through pages of bureaucratic language, nominalisations and passive moods. And they do this deliberately. It’s all part of the plot against editorial staff.