The Story of English in 100 Words (35 page)

How many of these will last? Many, especially those used in texting, are likely to have a short life (
§94
). But
app
seems a safe bet for a permanent place in the language. The number of apps are now in the hundreds of thousands, and mobile phones are increasingly the technology of choice for internet connection, so this is plainly an abbreviation that is not going to go away. Who would use four syllables (
applications
) in everyday speech when they can use one?

Cherry-picking

corporate speak (20th century)

This chapter is going to bring to the table a brain-dump of buzzworthy outcomes.

By close of play you’ll have seen the value-added, the wow factor, of this joined-up state-of-the-art, blue-sky thinking. It’ll be a no-brainer, a win-win situation, a foot-on-the-ball result. I’ll be thinking out of the box. I’ll cherry-pick the low-hanging fruit so that you’ll see cutting-edge practice. Think synergy. Think mission. The bottom line is you’ll take ownership of my visioning.

Cherry-pick
, meaning ‘choose selectively the most beneficial courses of action’, is, like many other pieces of business jargon, a development of the 1960s. My pastiche is not unlike the ‘corporate speak generators’ that can be found online, producing strings of humorous nonsense – the humour, of course, lying in the fact that the results are uncomfortably close to the realities of what is daily heard and read in many offices.

What is going on? It isn’t just a matter of jargon. Every profession, trade or social group has its special language – the technical terms, abbreviations and idioms which show that you are an electrician, lawyer, priest, journalist, doctor … To insiders, these terms are unproblematic: they define their professionalism. People only start condemning such language as jargon when the insiders talk to outsiders in an unthinking or pretentious way, using obscure words without considering the effect on their listeners.

Corporate speak is more than jargon. While such terms as
synergy, incentivise
and
leveraging
can be difficult to grasp, there’s nothing especially hard about
wow factor
,
low-hanging fruit
or (at least to cricket fans)
close of play
. But these phrases nonetheless attract criticism. The charge is that, even though they are simple, they have lost their meaning through overuse. They have become automatic reactions, verbal tics, a replacement for intelligent thinking. In short, they have become inappropriately used clichés.

These days the charges come from both inside and outside the world of business management. And the criticisms are particularly harsh when other domains pick up corporate speak. Government departments especially have to be careful if they lapse into it. A UK parliamentary select committee in July 2009
examined the matter, and the chairman introduced the topic using another pastiche:

Perhaps I could say, by way of introduction, welcome to our stakeholders. We look forward to our engagement, as we roll out our dialogue on a level playing field, so that, going forward in the public domain, we have a win-win step change that is fit for purpose across the piece.

Everyone in the room recognised the symptoms. And the subsequent discussion focused on the kinds of language routinely being used in government circles, such as
unlocking talent, partnership pathways, a quality and outcomes framework
and
best practice flowing readily to the frontline
. What could be done about it?

It’s easier to identify symptoms than to suggest cures. And it’s easy to parody. Eradicating habitual usage is hard. But there is a mood around these days that something has to be done. Whether in business or in government, recognising models of
good
practice, and rewarding them, will be an important first step.

LOL

extspeak (20th century)

When
LOL
first appeared on computer and mobile phone screens, it caused not a little confusion. Some people were using it to mean ‘lots of love’. Others interpreted it as ‘laughing out loud’. It was an ambiguity that couldn’t last. Who knows how many budding relationships foundered in the early 2000s because recipients took the abbreviation the wrong way? Today it’s settled down. Almost everyone now uses
LOL
in its ‘laughing’ sense. And it’s one of the few text-messaging acronyms to have crossed the divide between writing and speech.

Dictionaries of text-messaging list hundreds of acronyms and give the impression that a new language,
textese
, has emerged. In fact, now that collections of real text messages have been made and studied, it transpires that only a few of those abbreviations are used with any frequency. Replacing
see
by
c
,
you
by
u
and
to
by
2
are some of the commonly used strategies. But the kind of message in which every word is an abbreviation (
thx 4 ur msg c u 18r
) is really rather unusual. On average, only about 10 per cent of the words in a text are abbreviated. And in many adult texting situations, textisms are frowned upon, or even banned, because the organisers know that not everyone will understand them.

The novelty of texting abbreviations has also been overestimated. Several were actually part of computer interaction in chatrooms long before texting arrived in the late 1990s. And some can be traced back over many years. In a poem called ‘An Essay to Miss Catherine Jay’, an anonymous author begins:

An S A now I mean 2 write
2 U sweet K T J …

20. An illustration of cultural differences in the use of emoticons. In Western countries, emoticons are viewed sideways and focus on the mouth; in the East, they are horizontal and focus on the eyes.

It was published in 1875. Lewis Carroll and Queen Victoria are among the many Victorians who played with such sound/letter substitutions.

On the other hand, there’s nothing in older usage that quite lives up to the modern penchant for taking an abbreviation and adding to it. Thus, from the basic form
imo
(‘in my opinion’) we find
imho
(‘in my humble opinion’),
imhbco
(‘in my humble but correct opinion’) and
imnsho
(‘in my not so humble opinion’). And a similar thing happens to the other big innovation of contemporary electronic communication: the emoticon or smiley. Based on :), used to express a friendly reaction, we find :)), :))) and other extensions conveying increased intensity of warmth.

It’s difficult to say how many of the novel computer abbreviations will remain in the language, once the novelty has worn off.
Txt
,
txtng
and related forms may survive, but only as long as the technology does. And who can say whether, in fifty years’ time, people will still be typing such forms as
brb
(‘be right back’) and
afaik
(‘as far as I know’) and sending each other combinations of cat pictures + non-standard grammar (
lolcats
)? Will there still be keyboards and keypads then, even, or will everything be done through automatic speech recognition? With electronic communication, as I said earlier (
§32
), we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Jazz

word of the century (20th century)

Since 1990, members of the American Dialect Society have voted on the ‘Word of the Year’ (
§91
). The selection reflects social as much as linguistic factors. In 1999, they chose
Y2K
. In 2001,
9–11
. And the economic crisis of recent years is reflected in
sub-prime
for their 2007 choice and
bailout
for 2008. It’s thus something of a relief to find
tweet
their selection for 2009 (
§10
0).

Choosing a word for a year is difficult enough. Much more difficult is a ‘Word of the Decade’. In 2010 the members of the Society chose
google
. That seems fair enough. But what would you do for the ‘Word of the Century’?

They chose
jazz
. It was perhaps bending the truth a little, but not much. The word doesn’t surface until the century is over ten years old. In 1913, a San Francisco commentator described
jazz
as ‘a futurist word which has just joined the language’. However, he wasn’t referring to the musical sense, which didn’t arrive until a couple of years later. He meant
jazz
as a slang term for ‘pep’ or ‘excitement’. It also meant ‘excessive talk, nonsense’. This general sense is still known in the expression
and all that jazz
, meaning ‘and stuff like that’. As an adjective, it developed a wide range of senses – ‘lively’, ‘vivid’, ‘sophisticated’. There were
jazz dances
and
jazz patterns
(in clothing and furniture); there was
jazz journalism
and
jazz language
. Today we’d say
jazzy
.

The music sense is first recorded in the Chicago press of 1915 – and it quickly took off. It was used to describe hundreds of notions associated with the music – types of music (
jazz blues, jazz classics
), musical instruments (
jazz guitar, jazz clarinet
), players and singers (
jazz pianist, jazz vocalist
) and performing groups (
jazz quartet, jazz combo
). Virtually all the terms we now associate with jazz (
band, club, music, singer, records
) were in use by the end of the 1920s.

The word acquired more applications as the century progressed. New musical trends motivate fusions, so we find such phrases as
jazz-rock
,
jazz-funk
and
jazz-rap
. In the 1950s and ’60s, we encounter
jazzetry
(‘reading poetry to jazz’) and
jazzercise
(‘performing physical exercises to jazz’). In the 1990s, we find
jazz cigarettes
(‘marijuana’).

The early practitioners of jazz knew that they were living through a musical revolution:
jazz era
is first used in 1919;
jazz age
in 1920. Not everyone would agree with the voting of the Society members, which probably reflects their musical interests as much as anything else, but to my mind it was quite a good choice.