This week I’m going to spoil myself and release my inner Old Fart, and do what old people do best: Rant. This need to fulminate nearly always goes alongside a sense that the world is in terminal decline and that this fall from grace is reflected in our language, so I intend to single out several words and phrases that make me want to throw a brick through the nearest window, especially if the room is occupied by middle-managers.

Journey

This is probably the blackest of my current bêtes noires. Suddenly everything has become a journey and I hear or read this buzzword several times a day. For example, my football team has just sacked its incompetent manager who had overseen a plummet into the relegation zone and, according to the podcast put out by the local football press, the club is now going on a journey, as are its new head coach and its players and fans. No. If I stand in Liverpool Street Station and I have a train ticket for Norwich, I am going on a journey. But what my club has done is make a decision about its future and no one has packed a suitcase and is heading for the Norfolk Broads.

The current fashion for this word is not a stand-alone phenomenon: it is part of a cluster of words, the purpose of which is to self-dramatise and make our lives seem more interesting and significant than they are. Nowadays we all have a story to tell and, if we’re smart, a backstory as well. Every competitor on Britain’s Got Mediocrity has one – a cousin struggling with cancer who is the reason they are hoping to win, a poverty-stricken childhood where they couldn’t afford an I-phone, a heartless rejection from a lover that sent them spiralling into bulimia – and the audience hoots with pleasure when the trauma is announced. Then there is marketing’s love of experience. Once upon a time, we went shopping – nowadays we have a shopping experience. But this is only the tip of the banality and bathos: going to church is now a worshipping experience, and meeting up with friends is a bonding experience, and it wouldn’t surprise me to read that changing to a new brand of cereal is a breakfasting experience. Meanwhile, three men and his dog listening to a speech in a dusty old library is elevated to at least the level of an event.

The link between these things is narrative, which is not only people’s love of a good story but has now accrued academic cachet in the arts as what was once literary or artistic criticism has become little more than gossip and tittle-tattle (Bloomsbury Set, anyone?). It is not only the lack of anything which might once have been called ‘close reading’; it’s that the work has become relegated to a secondary status in a world where artists have become a brand and what we get is their backstory. I admit that the alternative to this glorified gossip – one of the numerous critical theories available – is equally reductive and often disrespectful to the work itself which is seen as just a clothes horse to hang a theory on, but two wrongs don’t make a right and frankly I don’t care what Virginia and Vita had for breakfast. Journeys, stories, backstories and experiences all spring from the same positioning of the individual as the centre of reality, the focus of all meaning. It’s a shallow and self-obsessed world in which everything is familiar and personal and easy, and we gulp it gratefully down like syrup. No God, no beliefs, no standards, no attachments, nothing beyond ourselves: just the narcissism of atomised individuals staring into mirrors to witness their own importance.

Based On Science

There are many variations on this – scientifically shown to be true, studies prove that…, surveys demonstrate…, statistics reveal…, the latest studies debunk…, and so on – but they are all parasitic on the high regard that science has in our society. The problem is that the videos that splash this across their title page are almost never truly scientific in approach, while the manufacturers of the products in our supermarkets see a few sciency words as an opportunity to bamboozle and hoodwink customers. When these phrases appear on a title page or on packaging, it’s a good idea to remind yourself that someone somewhere is trying to sell you something.

Yes, I know I watch lots of YouTube videos and, like everyone else, I will tend to believe what I want to believe, but I do my best to keep in mind that no video can come close to proving or disproving anything in such a short period of time. First and most obviously, unless we’re an expert in a field we cannot possibly know how much cherry-picking has taken place: carnivores and vegans will select very different studies to support their cause and ignore ones which offer less convincing evidence. Videos are also poorly equipped to display graphic information, as we freeze the film and squint at the screen to try to see what it shows. In short, read a book instead: we can go at our own speed and really scrutinise the arguments and the graphics, and it’s much harder for the writer to gloss over facts and data that are less supportive of their convictions.

As for packaging, see it for what it is: manipulation. One quick way of finding out which words are nutritionally en vogue would be to follow the history of what is written on product packaging. At the moment, ‘protein’ is the clear winner, having taken over from ‘fat-free’ and ‘low in salt’ and ‘no added sugar’, like a list of top athletes who retire as a new champ climbs onto the podium. There is no floor to the possible absurdities of this, as is shown by orange juice with ‘gluten-free’ on the can. The real science, of course, all of those long, multi-syllabic ingredients that come straight from the lab, is squeezed into a corner of the packaging in lettering so tiny that we need to take a magnifying glass to the store.

This veneer of nutritional buzzwords on the package may just seem like the usual puffery and flim-flam of product marketing, but its reluctant display of scientific data feeds on our ambivalence towards science: a blend of a childish belief that it is Santa coming down the chimney with lots of presents, and a fear that it is the anti-Christ arriving to destroy the world. Smarter vloggers who want to bask in the glory of science have learned the basics and can trot out the platitudes at will: ‘logical fallacies’; ‘correlation is not causation’; ‘the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’, and of course they will be quick to label any beliefs opposing their own as ‘pseudoscience’. But this call to science is so often paper-thin. ‘Based on science’ is there to put us to sleep, to encourage us to take an uncritical approach to their claims, the polar opposite of the scepticism that should lie at the roots of all good science.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

I know this phrase is massively out-of-date, and that even the most obtuse of middle-managers might blush to use it nowadays, but it remains a perfect symbol of the profound insincerity at the heart of corporate bullshit and the hideous neologisms that business dreams up and is rightly ridiculed for.

First, there is the gobbledygook, the main purpose of which is to show that someone is completely au fait with all the rapidly changing jargon of management-speak and has attended the latest required middle-management courses while the minions in their care are busy at their desks actually doing all the work. The monstrosities that result are easy to list: ‘blue sky thinking’, ‘game changer’, ‘going forward’, ‘action item’, ‘operationalise’, reaching out’, ‘mission critical’, ‘onboarding’. I guess these are harmless in the sense that they butcher language rather than people and can even be a useful guide to signal who to avoid sitting next to in the latest pointless HR ‘unleash your inner animal’ workshop. And if consenting adults wish to get together in their covens and nibble biscuits and show off the latest linguistic gem they’ve picked up on their recent training jolly, I guess it’s each to their own. At least while they’re in Bali, they’re out of our hair for a while and not making our lives a misery with their endless e-mails and directives.

Much more culpable are those words that are designed to hide the ugly truth of corporate capitalism, which is that its purpose is to make as much money as possible for its shareholders even if this means selling noxious baby formula to underdeveloped countries or forcing farmers to grow seedless produce to make sure they remain indentured serfs. The daddy of these weaselly phrases is probably good old CSR, with its planting of trees and its extravagant claims of concern for its stakeholders. Yes, we’re all in this together, as one middle-management team announced in a university where I worked as they informed us that our salaries were about to be slashed. I doubt many of them would have the gall to say that nowadays, although I mustn’t underestimate their obtuseness or inability to ‘read the room’, but as we learned in those HR unleash-your-inner-animal workshops, while we’re all in this together, some animals are more equal than others.

At least this corporate crapola can offer us moments of levity, as, for example, the playing of Office Bingo during particularly turgid meetings as a self-important middle-manager drones incessantly on. And certain words which are de rigueur in corporate life and corporate marketing – such as ‘passion’ – can lead to moments of surreal humour: ‘Here at XYZ, we are passionate about ballbearings’. Such inappropriate linguistic hyperbole always reminds me of Liz Truss’ earliest signs of incipient insanity in her famous speech about cheese. If you’ve never seen it, look it up online. It’s a hoot.

I’ve focused here on the sins of corporations, but before we leave the world of organisational flatulence, it’s worth mentioning that governments are just as guilty of crimes against humanity, perhaps especially so, since in theory at least they are there as democratic representatives of their citizens. At least capitalism is honest about being red in tooth and claw, while governments are much more insidious when they are economical with the truth. In the UK, for instance, at some point state pensions ceased to be a ‘right’ and became a ‘benefit’, with all the sneaky wriggle-room this creates for their later removal. Never mind that this is our money which we paid into the system and not a benefit which they give us out of the kindness of their hearts, money which we paid into their Ponzi scheme which they largely used to try to keep their own party in power. Then there is the sickening faux-egalitarianism of the people – the government equivalent of ‘we’re all in this together’ – as in the ‘People’s Princess’ and ‘the will of the people’ which served Brexiters so well post-referendum.

Empowerment

Having excoriated corporate capitalism for its deceptions and chicanery, and slated the hypocrisies of ‘gammon’ in phrases like ‘the will of the people’, it’s only fair that I also mention the linguistic clichés of ‘woke’, summed up in the word empowerment. This is a feel-good word that suggests the poor and downtrodden will one day rise above their oppression and reject the opiate they are offered. As such it is definitely well-intentioned, but I can’t help but feel that there is more than a touch of the triumph of hope over experience when it is used. It is also incredibly vague, suggesting everything from personal enlightenment and the end of false consciousness to a shiny new liberated world that emerges after a transformative rendering of We Shall Overcome.

It seems impossible to remain neutral when looking at possible words or phrases which might appear in this section, from the rather general concepts of privilege and intersectionality and cultural appropriation to the more specific contested expressions around gender and sexuality (LGBT with its various optional additions, gender neutrality, issues surrounding pronouns, non-binary, cis and so on), and race (BAME, Black Lives Matter). These are the core conflicts at the heart of the so-called culture wars and I can no more be neutral about them than anyone else, but for me the key concern is that many of these words and phrases are becoming stripped of content and simply serving as signals of our position within those wars. Their heart is in the right place but essentially they’re feel-good.

It can also be argued that many ‘woke’ expressions are barely-disguised attacks on various Others. Men come out of this particularly badly, with phrases such as toxic masculinity, mansplaining, alpha-male, simp, ghosting, and so on, although there are, of course, plenty of examples of similar put-downs of women, especially in offline culture.

One interesting curiosity is that sometimes the positive expressions around the concept of empowerment share a lot of the rhetoric of corporate capitalism, although it can be argued that the former is at least sincere rather than the latter’s gross exploitation of youthful idealism. In many ways, the lyrics of I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing, immortalised in the famous multi-cultural advert for Coke, come close to matching the sentimentalised fringes of empowerment and its dream of a world where all barriers of gender, race, class, and sexuality (but not age) have disappeared and the globe has finally become Blue Mink’s melting pot.

It’s Not All Bad

If you’ve got as far as reading this, you only have yourself to blame: I warned you that I loved a good whinge. But I’d like to finish on a positive note all the same. First of all, slang is just slang. It comes and goes and is often imaginative and lively during its short time in the streets and bars. Yes, there are words, such as operationalise, whose inventor deserves to be tarred and feathered and sent to Mars along with Elon Musk, but each generation has its own good stuff, too. For example, my generation had fab, groovy, square, hip and a thousand other linguistic nine-day wonders. So I have no wish for this essay to trash the latest models off the production line. For example, I think the word slop, repurposed as a noun to describe the never-ending effluvium which is spewing out of AI and destroying the net, is a perfect choice. And, while researching for this piece, I found an item of recent slang that I’d never come across before: delulu. This is a shortened version of delusional, and I just love its mad-as-a-box-of-frogs meaning and rhythm and mood. I hope it finds the permanent place in our vocabulary which it deserves.