The Word Use Tribunal
Perhaps you have noticed a popular custom when organising a meeting, whereby one person will text or email another asking if there is a time that would be convenient for the two of them to partake in a phone call. Now, in the olden days, when phones had spiralling cords you could twiddle while you chatted, one person would simply call another. On the telephone. Out of nowhere. A stealth attack. A mini meeting in the lead-up to the proper meeting. All of this has had me wondering: the meeting is a famously unpopular means of communication, but it shouldn’t be, should it? A meeting! Two or more people! United in both geography and time! Several different timelines braiding themselves together for a moment in time. It’s a miraculous thing! There are movies about it. People meeting who change each other’s lives forever. They fall in love. They ruin each other. They say the wrong thing in the wrong timeline and blow it all to hell. What a waste of the word ‘meeting’.
Public Service Announcement: it has come to my attention as the self-appointed president of the Word Usage Tribunal (WUT) that certain literary words have had their meanings stolen, dissolved, subverted, bastardised and in some cases gruesomely dismembered by ruthless business and PR executives. While it is a truth universally acknowledged that money makes the world go round, the literary world runs on the currency of words alone. We would like them back please.
The word ‘passionate’, rumbling as it has like a sizzling cauldron beneath the history of poetry and gothic romance for centuries, is now most often found in annual reports and CVs for jobs like ‘compliance advisor’ or ‘marketing consultant’. This is completely unacceptable. The Department recommends instant action on this one.
The word ’pathways’. This is one of ours from way back. It’s a beautiful image. A metaphor. A symbol. It’s also a framing device, I mean we barely know where to keep it in the toolshed, it’s such a practical, elegant, flexible piece of linguistic equipment. Is your character contemplating where to go next? Are they looking back over the journey they have undertaken? Is there something dark and foreboding or an exciting escape? See! We use it heaps! Extra points if the phrase deployed is ‘pathway forward’. No. Please no.
Touch points. We don’t really use this one, although it is a good example of the use of imagery to gesture towards an ill-defined, poorly conceived plan containing a shambolic mess of conflicting ideas. In literature, touch points, particularly in the romance genre, are defined as ‘moments in the narrative which one must be careful when reading on the bus’. This one? You can keep. But you’re using it wrong.
Reaching out. Now see you’ve utterly ruined this one. We would say something like, ‘She reached out to touch his cheek’ or ‘The fisherwoman reached out, gripping the side of the jetty with her other hand as the rain roared around them. Her whole body leaned forward, straining towards the boy. Although they did not speak the same language, and in any case neither of them would have heard the other’s shout, the boy in the water knew what to do’. You use it like this, ‘Suggest we reach out to Samantha re a path forward for financials so we can get some clarity on touch points for the report’. We win this one on any points system and you know it. This one feels personal.
At the end of the day. Nope. You’ve ruined it. The end of the day. What a glorious metaphor. Gone, now. Rendered both meaningless and ubiquitous at the same time. Ubiquitous is ours too by the way so don’t even think about it.
Meeting new people is the peak of human experience. It’s wonderful and terrible and dangerous and delightful and confusing. Yes some staff meetings can be this too, but the words we use in a corporate setting, while useful for such purposes, are sharper tools when wielded by the experts. Anyway, business gets all kinds of things. Money, tax cuts, offices with water views, coffee machines in the staff room. There is no need to steal our stuff. On behalf of the WUT, the defence rests. For now. Should these crimes continue to be ubiquitous, however, you will be hearing from our lawyers.