Rex Features

The bastardisation of the English language

Guardian of proper English Rachel Johnson would like to future a word with you

12 Aug 2016

I used to scream at the telly when some smiley weather girl started waving her arms and talking about the 'weather story' or the 'narrative' as regards Storm Desmond. Now I've given up. I just smile bravely when my expensively educated son (Ashdown House, Marlborough) replies, when I ask him how he is, 'I'm good at the minute,' or when I thank the barista for my flat white and he says, 'Not a problem' or 'No worries.'

So my moan here is not those glinting new coinages that enter the dictionaries every year like fatshame or slutwalk or Brexit. My moan is about how everyday speech has become so ugly and annoying in so many ways. You are about to read a piece that is full of words and phrases I'd like to ban, so brace, brace - as they say on planes when you're about to crash.

Where to begin? I know. Prepositional creep. We don't park now. We park up. A woman with cramps isn't having her period. She's on it. Trains don't arrive at Wolverhampton any more. They arrive in a station stop.

Secondly, meaningless words. What is 'safeguarding'? 'Wrongdoing'? 'Iconic'? Why do people say they have spent the morning 'curating' their cutlery drawer, or 'navigating' the kitchen, presumably on their 'journey' to lunch? What do these words even mean (and 'even' is another word that has crept into every sentence, as a knowing intensifier, like 'how very dare he?')? What makes this so much worse is that the usage and abusage of our language is catching, and we are all guilty of common debauch of our greatest asset and export.

Social media and Americans and celebrities on reality TV spread the annoyingness
like Ebola, and so we find ourselves saying, 'hashtag awkward' or 'sadface', or even ignoring the imperfect and saying, 'I was sat' or 'I was stood' like some numpty on TOWIE. James Corden said, 'I was laid on my lounger by the pool' on a show recently - but it's only a matter of time before I say it myself, probably on live television or radio, and
on a brainy programme like Any Questions?.

At the Oscars, there was a perfect storm of verbal ghastliness when Lady Gaga yodelled a ballad about campus rape surrounded by survivors of sexual assault. The survivors were inevitably 'empowered' by being in a 'safe space' and some dim actress tweeted, 'Those survivors. Floored by the courage. And beauty. And realness.' Realness? My giddy aunt!

My former colleague Lucy Kellaway of
the FT awards an annual 'Nerb' prize, in recognition of how nouns have become verbs. She has given gongs to the following: To effort. To front-burnerise. To town hall.
To potentiate. To future. To value add. 'Any would have been a worthy winner,' she says, 'yet all were swept aside by "to language" when a reader overheard a colleague saying: "There must be a better way to language it."'

During the Olympics, commentators would endlessly spout that an athlete was about to 'podium' and when my father Stanley climbed Kilimanjaro twice in two years he would tell people he'd 'summited'. Universities spend their time 'no-platforming' perfectly sensible people like Germaine Greer, in case they say something 'inappropriate'. And across America, people actually say, 'to caucus'. Other bugbears: people who pretend not to understand Twitter and say, 'I twitted ha ha' make me gnash my teeth. Not clever. Not funny.

Death is a tremendous generator of hideousness: why do we accept that people
- too often termed 'late, great' - have 'passed away' or worse, 'passed', as if they were a kidney stone through the male urethra? Ugh.

So is TV. Craig Brown loathes the fact
every single reporter will answer in reply to every single question from the presenter, 'So...' (this pained viewer adds, or 'well...').

Henry Wyndham, the former chairman of Sotheby's, detests anything that ends
in 'ality' like 'optionality'. Lady Sophia Topley, the daughter of the late Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, abhors 'driveway' instead of 'drive'. My sister-in-law Caroline Dawnay, doyenne of literary agents, resents the way 'home' has replaced 'house'. Daisy Waugh, the writer, hates 'countryside' instead of country, 'yay', 'eek', 'jump on a call', 'can I get' instead of 'please may I have' and 'I don't do...' followed by any noun (as in 'I don't do gluten').

To end on a more positive note: Mary Killen of this parish says she can't bear 'love you', but I like it, especially when you hear colleagues blurt it out by mistake at the end of work calls to their boss. I also like 'you're not wrong', especially in a cod Northern accent.

Right, that's it. For my sins, I'm off for a light bite with my other half, selecting the vegetarian option as my mains, followed by a coffee. Love you!

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