thedanglingmodifier.co.uk

Every B2B editor is familiar with jargon – it’s one of those things we live with. The buzzwords, the key phrases strung together like the lumps in a length of drool coughed up by a heavy smoker. We live with it, edit it – where possible we delete it. But what was I to do when I came across ‘sewerage undertakers’ this week?

Exactly! You’re right! My first instinct was to check whether ‘sewerage’ was really the right word. Shouldn’t it be ‘sewage’?

The Oxford English Dictionary told me that ‘sewerage’ was the American version of ‘sewage’. Interesting, I thought, and wondered whether my fellow blogger, Lynnequist who writes ‘Separated by a Common Language’ has ever written about sewerage.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, I couldn’t find anything about it on her blog among the lists of awards and commendations. Doubtless she has never had to spend her working day wading through copy on sustainable drainage systems and the like.

OED – “wrong on sewerage”

So, I was forced to confront the author of the sewage content with my query. He was adamant that the OED was wrong, insisting that ‘sewage’ and ‘sewerage’ are quite different and describing ‘sewage’ as:

“the stuff that comes out…”

and ‘sewerage’ as:

“the network of pipes it comes out of.”

I was grateful for his delicacy, but cackled as I sent him an email asking for fuller definitions to go in the accompanying glossary.

Back to the sewerage undertakers: it turns out they are actual people – or at least organisations – who are responsible for maintaining the public sewers.

But who on earth decided to refer to them as ‘undertakers’? And why?

Is it because the thought of dealing with sewage is so grim that the word ‘undertakers’ seemed more appropriate than, for example, ‘workers’ or ‘maintenance team’?

It reminds me of the term ‘entrepreneur’, which became so fashionable in the 1980s and has remained so ever since.

I was – as a young innocent 20 or more years ago – always puzzled as to why people were so excited about being entrepreneurs. And I remember telling them frequently that the word they chose to describe themselves was actually the French word for ‘undertaker’.

Needless to say, nobody thanked me for this insight.

But in 2009 this word choice makes complete sense. It was, after all, the ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ of the bankers that got us all into the current financial ‘stuff that comes out’ of ‘the network of pipes it comes out of’.