We’ve been here before, but I couldn’t let Plain English month pass without another look at corporate jargon. Back in May, Briony Drimie referred to ‘a vein of Business English …  we commonly know as management-speak, which I have loathed since I first heard it’. She singled out a few well-known offenders: going forward, transitioning, singing from the same hymn sheet – all of which come in for regular denunciation on the Web. Wordnik, for example, has numerous lists created by its users, and several of these feature business jargon, under headings like ‘Business Words I Hate’.

Before we join in the general condemnation, it’s worth remembering that there are many blameless aspects of language which are widely disliked – but for no rational reason: split infinitives, for example, or the most common use of hopefully. Could it be that the widespread aversion to business-speak is just another case of (some) people objecting to perfectly normal examples of language change and innovation?

If Plain English means conveying your meaning clearly and without unnecessary complexity, then terminology has its place. During Subcultural English month, we looked at the ‘sublanguages’ typical of particular groups, from poker players to chemical engineers. Every field or leisure pursuit has its own vocabulary, and using terms your audience is familiar with isn’t incompatible with being ‘plain’. If I’m talking to linguists or language-teachers, it’s more economical to refer to collocation than ‘the way words often go together’. But when does terminology become jargon? Because, judging by its collocates, jargon is quite a negative word: adjectives that frequently occur with it include unnecessary, meaningless, pretentious, and impenetrable.

Many of the usual suspects – words that crop up regularly in people’s ‘hate lists’ – are hard to object to on rational grounds. Skillset and monetize, for example, are both concise ways of expressing a useful meaning, and both are the product of valid word-formation strategies. And while we’re on that subject, it might be useful to see what processes are employed for creating new business meanings. These include:

• making verbs from nouns: a popular theme in our blog, and a common practice in business (e.g. impact, transition, scope, task, leverage) – but widely criticized
• using suffixes like -ize or -ful: problematize, incentivize, impactful
• pluralizing nouns that are usually uncountable: behaviours, synergies, learnings

But if we focus on jargon (bad) as opposed to terminology (good), the interesting question is about motivation: why do people use it? Fashion plays a part (some expressions seem to catch on and then spread like viruses), and so does the desire to identify oneself as belonging to an in-group. Even the familiar clichés (low-hanging fruit, think outside the box, push the envelope, and so on) must have seemed fresh and interesting once – though why some people continue using them in the face of widespread ridicule is less easy to understand.

Another reason for abandoning Plain English is to confer a sense of importance, or imply a degree of complexity, when talking about something that’s essentially simple and straightforward. We see this, for example, in job titles devised to give an inflated view of a simple task (there’s a nice ‘random job generator’ you can use for this purpose), or in some people’s preference for words like utilize or purchase over their simpler equivalents.

Sometimes, though, more sinister motives are at work – when jargon is used to disguise unpleasant truths. The military are well-known for glossing over unfortunate accidents with formulations like collateral damage and friendly fire. The equivalent in the workplace is being fired, and there’s a wide range of euphemisms for this: the company is restructuring, rightsizing, or even resource levelling. One way or another, you are being let go. (Stan Carey’s popular post on management-speak satirizes a corporate memo which is effectively firing the recipients, but avoids saying this in Plain English.) Another word favoured by Human Resources departments is empowerment, which is intended to convey the idea that people in lower positions are being given more power over what happens in the organization. Whether this is genuine or not, I’ll leave you to decide.

It’s the Plain English Awards season again, as Stan Carey noted in his recent post, and across the country winners are basking in the glory of an award or ruing their luck in being singled out as exemplars of gobbledygook.

One of the recipients of a “Golden Bull Award” (for the year’s ‘best’ examples of gobbledygook) was the British Met Office. Their particular crime was to refer to ‘probabilities of precipitation’ rather than, say, ‘the chances of rain’.

In their defence, they pointed out that the word precipitation covers all sorts of things falling out of the sky, not just rain. There’s also sleet, snow, hail and even, apparently, graupel. Furthermore, as they point out ‘The same weather system could produce snow, sleet and rain across even quite a relatively small area’ so it is not necessarily helpful to specify just one of those. They have a point, but the trouble with precipitation is that it’s thought of as a slightly technical term, in a way that sleet or hail is not. All three are black words in MED, so not among the most frequent 7,500 words in the language, yet only precipitation attracts a subject label in the dictionary entry.

But to my mind, a much more culpable abuse of language was perpetrated by one of the other winners, a low-cost airline, in a letter responding to a customer’s complaint. The first paragraph, of approximately 60 words, reads:

I believe that what has not been explained to you is that it is not a £4.50 card charge, in the process of booking a flight, you will have a booking fee which is for a Credit Card (return journey), booking fee £4.50 and Credit Card supplement £1.00, for a (one way) booking fee £5.50 and credit card charge £1.00.

The second paragraph is even longer, at 83 words, and no more comprehensible.

Surprisingly, the winner of the “Foot in Mouth” award for public gaffes is Silvio Berlusconi – who as far as I know tends to speak Italian. Among other gaffes, he reportedly said ‘I am pretty often faithful’. A gaffe, indeed, but hardly one that transgresses the norms of English.

The “Kick in the pants” award went to an organization that we used to call the Inland Revenue but now have to call Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (informally still known as the taxman, a name that might have been a suitable topic for our gender English month) for the simple fact of having generated ‘an unacceptable amount of public complaints received by Plain English Campaign in 2011′. One wonders whether the complaints were really about the language or about the message.

But as in all years, there are also awards for the worthy. This year’s “International Media Award” went to China Daily ‘For the clear communication of business news to a global audience.’ Congratulations to China Daily, and indeed to all winners of this year’s awards.

A recent round-up of language news featured an article by Robert Lane Greene, explaining his dislike of the word literally: ‘When used as a mere intensifier … it has almost no kick at all. And when misused, it can be spectacular.’ On the face of it, he has a point. We know that words don’t have to be confined to their original (‘literal’) meanings, but literally feels like a special case, and when the captain of a winning sports team says ‘we were literally on fire’ – when, in other words, literally is used to mean figuratively – there could be a problem.

It will come as no surprise that this usage (and the hostile reaction to it) is far from recent. In addition to the basic sense of ‘word for word’ (The Spanish equivalent for ‘I’m hungry’ is, literally, ‘I have hunger’), literally is often used as a device for adding emphasis, to stress that we really mean what we are saying:

This leaves no obvious signs of cause of death, as the animal literally dies of fright.

In the Macmillan English Dictionary, this emphatic use is shown as the first meaning, but following this is a ‘subsense’ (1a), explaining the usage that causes all the controversy – with the example When I told him the news, he literally exploded. Well over 100 years ago, this was also identified in the OED, which notes that literally is:

often used improperly to indicate that some conventional metaphorical or hyperbolical phrase is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense

This ‘improper’ use is supported by quotations from reputable authors like Alexander Pope, and in an excellent article devoted to the same issue, Jesse Sheidlower shows how a long list of revered literary giants (from Jane Austen to James Joyce) have also used this device. As Sheidlower points out, ‘most usage advice could be reduced to one simple instruction: “Be clear”.’ So the question is not whether it is logical to use a word to mean its opposite (language isn’t always logical), but whether this usage creates ambiguity and risks obscuring the speaker’s intended message. And the best way to test this  is to look at some corpus data.

Our corpus includes almost 30,000 examples of literally, and I’ve looked at a sample of 1000. The great majority reflect one of the unproblematic senses of literally. The ‘emphatic’ use is especially common with numbers and measurements, and it’s easy to see why. People often exaggerate amounts (It weighed a ton, he’s got millions of CDs) so when we report what might look like a surprisingly high number, it makes sense to clarify that we are not exaggerating:

Pilgrims came literally in thousands, necessitating a branch rail line into the town.
We have then to investigate literally hundreds, possibly even thousands of different sites.

For similar reasons, we sometimes need to make it clear that an expression which is normally used metaphorically is in this case being used in its literal meaning:

He [the surgeon] delicately cut away the bone spurs in my lumbar spine – these were literally ripping the nerves to shreds!
The problem is her son-in-law, whose sports supply shop has just, quite literally, gone up in smoke!

In the disputed use, the opposite happens: literally modifies an expression that is being used in its (normal) figurative meaning. Here the word has no real meaning. The intention is simply to add emphasis, but the effect can be disconcerting if we interpret literally to mean, err, ‘literally’:

There were a number of occasions when Southampton literally missed the boat in terms of economic development.
This year looks set to be bigger than ever, with application forms literally flying off the shelves.
We are literally thrown in at the deep end, being sent out into central London to find stories before the end of the day.
Your mother would literally roll in her grave if she heard you saying that.

It may be better to avoid this kind of thing, but it has to be said that – in all the corpus lines I looked at – the writer’s meaning was always perfectly clear. At first I thought this one looked odd:

Many people queued up to start the race, but only you completed it … In fact you beat off literally millions, even billions, of others to claim the prize.

How could a race involve billions of competitors? But the context (as it usually does) makes it all clear, as the writer continues:

Of course you won’t remember this. You were just a sperm at the time!

So the ‘problem’ use of literally looks like just another form of hyperbole, which attaches itself to expressions that are almost always used figuratively. It’s literally bananas!

Another battle in the ongoing ‘language wars’ was fought in London earlier in the week. There were no clear victors but the forces of reason looked more convincing than those of prejudice. The excellent Evolving English exhibition at the British Library hosted a debate on Monday on the always contentious theme of ‘What is proper English?’. People love to argue (and complain) about language so, not surprisingly, the event attracted a capacity crowd. I was afraid it would consist entirely of ‘old buffers’ with implacable views about what is ‘proper’, so it was encouraging to see plenty of younger people too. Issues that were discussed included regional Englishes, the status of dialects, and the question of ‘ownership’ (there was a consensus that no-one – not even the Queen – ‘owns’ English).

The panel was nicely balanced, with Bernard Lamb of the Queen’s English Society (which we’ve discussed before); author and theatre critic Henry Hitchings; and our old friend Rowan Sawday, aka Dizraeli. To get things started, each panellist gave a 5-minute summary of their position (uh-oh: I’ve already committed a heinous error: should have said ‘of his position’). In Dizraeli’s case this meant standing up and delivering his 21st Century Flux rap – to the horror of the old buffers and the delight of everyone else. Hitchings, whose latest book is a history of arguments about ‘correct’ usage, made the point that people have been complaining about our language going to the dogs for at least 500 years.

Bernard Lamb mentioned some things he had seen in his recent reading, such as someone spelling ‘public’ without the ‘l’, or a student who wrote about how ‘genetics effects pregnancy’. But surely these are just mistakes: words have meanings which, as a speech community, we generally agree on (if we didn’t, communication would be impossible). So if you choose the wrong word (like pubic instead of public), you create a meaning you didn’t intend to and you won’t be understood. But that’s not the same as ‘bad grammar’.

Lamb defined ‘standard’ English as ‘clear correct English’, but isn’t this conflating two completely different ideas? Most speakers and writers aim to be clear, and if your message is clear (in context) you will be understood. So using effect when you mean affect fails on grounds of clarity. But ‘correctness’ is a more problematic notion: who decides, and what are the criteria? Judging by Bernard Lamb’s responses to audience questions, it all looks rather arbitrary: ‘Do you accept innit?’ ‘No, it’s poor English.’ ‘Can we say their instead of his or her (as in ‘everyone should bring their own books’)?’ ‘I don’t like it’. And so on.

Some audience members were even more out of touch, one lamenting that anticipate was no longer used in its ‘correct’ meaning. This makes about as much sense as saying that gay should only mean ‘cheerful’. The meaning referred to is number 3 here: that was indeed the original meaning of anticipate but it has since developed new meanings. This is normal. The clue is in the title of the exhibition, and if English wasn’t ‘evolving’ we’d all still be talking like Chaucer’s storytellers. Towards the end, Dizraeli got the biggest cheer of the evening by observing that ‘You can waste an awful lot of energy getting upset about things that are perfectly clear’.

Alay is a way of writing that allows you to use capital letters and numbers wherever you jolly well like in a word and it’s currently trending on Twitter. Alay started in Indonesia in about 2004; it seems that it has provided a root for a phenomenon that pervades many areas of popular culture, such as fashion and music. The main aim of Alay culture seems to be narcissism. It’s all about getting noticed and that includes what you write. There is also an ‘I hate Alay’ website, which, to me, shows the influence of this social medium – it is obviously engaging people, whether negatively or positively. I quite like the Alay way of writing: it’s funky and useful because it allows me to stress parts of different words and it is another method of enriching the nuances of any digital message I might send, rather like an emoticon would. However, I’ve also seen passages of Alay that are so altered that they are almost indecipherable and that is not so helpful. So WH4t dO y00 th1NK?

Similarly to this time last year, we are bringing you a list of those blog posts on the Macmillan Dictionary Blog which have been the most popular in terms of number of readers. Many of them still have ongoing conversations so have a read and join in by commenting!

I would like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to everybody who has contributed in one (or more) of the many ways: by writing a guest post, by commenting, or by joining us on Twitter or on the What’s your English? Facebook page.

The Macmillan Dictionary team look forward to more of the same in 2011

Our 10 most popular blog posts in 2010

The trickiest word in American
by Vicki Hollett
If you haven’t found out yet, this is your chance to get to know which word that is.

What’s your favourite English word?
by You All
A fantastic collection of words you love in the English language. Thank you for sharing them with us!

A Brit’s take on American English
by Vicki Hollett
The post takes us beyond words. The comments are also well worth the read.

The 21st Century Flux
by Dizraeli & Laine Redpath-Cole
The opening post to our smashing What’s your English? campaign, plus Dizraeli’s fabulous video.

American English? What’s that?
by Robert Lane Greene
Foath floah and all … Johnson blogger Lane Greene defines ‘American English’.

Baby face
by Sharon Creese
You won’t go away without adding at least one new word to your vocabulary!

Tomato? Tomato? It’s all English, isn’t it?
by Dawn Nell
Historian and blogger Dawn Nell discusses Global English.

You say “lovely”, I say “great”
by Michael Rundell
You may still be pondering the use for Twitter. Well, some people have found a good use for the tweets.

Where has grammar been hiding all these years?
by Michael Rundell
Grammar doesn’t often make headline news. It did this year.

A two-horse race or a hung parliament?
by Michael Rundell
Another hot topic around the UK, the rest of Europe and pretty much around the whole world this year: politics and the words it spaws.

Check out this recent entry in the Macmillan Open Dictionary, blended family. A blended family is one formed from previous, unsuccessful relationships and replaces the old term, stepfamily. I don’t actually like this phrase; it suggests they’ve all been mixed up in a food processor, and I think it is a victim of the current fashion for everything to be blended: blended learning and blended search are just a couple of examples. I admit, however, that blended family is both effective and clear in its meaning. I can imagine it becoming popular.

So I mustn’t whinge about new words that I don’t like; after all – language is a democracy.

Do you ever see notices or signs that irritate you, or just bring a really bizarre image to mind? Even if they’re grammatically correct, the wording is so odd or unexpected that it grates on you every time you read it. And then, of course, there are the myriad ones where the grammar isn’t so correct, or where it’s just not saying what the writer meant it to say.

My long-time bugbear has always been ‘fresh laid hen’s eggs’. I mean, really – is there some other way of getting hen’s eggs, other than laying them? Are we distinguishing here from the ‘fresh magically-materialised eggs’ down the road, or is it the ‘fresh’ part that you’re trying to sell? Maybe this week you’ve decided not to sell the manky stale eggs you usually have, and instead are offering nice fresh ones as a special treat?

Or could it be that what you really mean to say is ‘freshly-laid hen’s eggs’, in which case, lovely, I’ll have an omelette please.

In a similar vein, there’s a farm down the road that’s currently selling ‘baby chicks’. ‘Baby chicks’ – you mean I won’t find six-foot-tall balls of juvenile plumage in there? Or wizened, world-weary chickens-in-miniature (presumably laying peanut-sized eggs, fresh or otherwise)? Oh the disappointment! Come on, Mr Farmer, the clue is in the word ‘chick’.

And then there’s the most recent one – a sign for a ‘specialised running store’. That’s got to be one clever shop, getting up and running off all by itself! I have visions of groups of joggers chasing the fleeing establishment down the road, waving their wallets …

So, somebody please tell me when the word fine stopped being fine?

When exchanging greetings with friends, I used to reply to any enquiry as to my health as ‘Fine, thanks’. When I still lived up North, a wry ‘Mustn’t grumble’ would usually suffice. This does not seem to be adequate any longer. People have begun to come back at me with ‘Just fine?’. What does that mean?! Isn’t fine fine anymore?

In the 1990s I worked for a US employer and there, uttering the word fine in response to a ‘HEY! How are ya?’ was tantamount to sharing suicidal feelings with a colleague. When asked how he was faring, my boss would gush in excruciatingly jolly tones, ‘I’m doing just GREAT thanks!’.  I find nowadays that my standard response is similar: ‘Great, thanks … you?’. Vicki Hollett talked about the difference between British and American meanings of certain words last week.

The thing is that fine these days just seems to mean ‘Oh, OK I suppose’, and it has also developed other, even less positive connotations:

‘So you won’t be able to make our anniversary dinner because you have to work late again? … FINE!’ – a declaration of war if ever I heard one.

Why won’t fine do anymore? Philip Kerr’s recent series on Hooray and Boo words in MED Magazine seems to sum it up for me. This is the concept that certain words produce a very definitely positive or negative response in a reader or listener. Everything has to be big and extreme and elicit an ecstatic response – otherwise we are not truly engaged, not truly alive. Why feel just fine, when you can feel GREAT? I just wonder what made fine slip to the bottom of the acceptably-positive league table all of a sudden?

The African Americans have reclaimed this word in a most inspiring way. They have taken it right back to its loveliest meaning. Not for them does ‘you look fine’ mean ‘you look perfectly acceptable’. They mean ‘you look FINE!’: think fine fabrics; fine jewellery, fine wines, kind of fine. I think these chaps have the right idea and that we should follow suit and make fine FINE once again.

If anyone reading this has found any words in the Macmillan Dictionary that have slipped or slunk from one meaning in common usage to another, please feel free to add such comments below – it’s FINE with me!

I feel I must begin this post by clarifying a couple of things. No, I don’t have a best mate called Tracey, and no, I’ve never in my life danced around my handbag in white stilettos in a nightclub. OK, glad we got that cleared up.

Non-native English speakers may be wondering what on earth I’m going on about, but the rest of you out there probably know exactly what I mean – the stereotypes that are associated with names.

As soon as someone hears your name, a whole slew of adjectives come to mind, some of them justified, some of them not. Introduce yourself as ‘Tristan’ or ‘Sebastian’ and people immediately think ‘wealthy’ and ‘privileged’, regardless of whether there’s anything to support that view. Tell someone your name’s ‘Kylie’, though, and they immediately think ‘working class’, simply because of the association with popular culture. ‘Sharon’, meanwhile, draws pictures of ‘party girl’ and ‘probably not that bright’ (much to my chagrin).

Sometimes these stereotypes can be simply amusing, other times downright misleading and annoying (consider the ‘not that bright’ one when you’re fresh out of college and trying to break into your chosen career!). Being named ‘India’ might mean your parents loved to travel, or even that you were conceived in India – it makes you sound exotic and perhaps a bit ‘hippyish’ – but if people automatically relate to you in that way, you could wind up feeling that no-one’s taking you seriously. (Even worse, if you’re called ‘Sky’ or ‘Storm’!) And just because your name’s ‘Kevin’ doesn’t mean you actually have to drive a Ford Escort with your name emblazoned across the top of the windscreen. How seriously is the salesman in the Ferrari dealership going to take you, once he finds out your name? All those zeros in your bank balance suddenly won’t matter a jot.

So, what words or stereotypes are attached to your name, and what’s the worst one you’ve ever been faced with (or, indeed, the funniest)? And how have you fought back against them? Years ago, a friend causally mentioned to me that I was ‘the most unSharon-like Sharon’ he’d ever met, so I decided the best way to beat the stereotype was to turn it on its head and just be as unSharonish as possible. It seems to have worked out OK – no-one’s ever that surprised at my dislike of nightclubs anyway!