Houston, we’ve had a probletunity, going forward
Management jargon and political gobbledegook exert a perverse pull on my attention, despite their often deadening inanity. At its best, this vacuous form of verbiage demands a dubious but undeniable...
View ArticleWords on a wire
We think of balance as a good thing, associating it with poise, equilibrium, evenness and harmony, as stability in unpredictable circumstances or as a healthy mix of disparate elements. It’s a...
View ArticleReporting on sporting clichés and metaphors
Since my last report on activities at Macmillan Dictionary Blog, I’ve written several articles there about words and language. Time for a quick recap. March was the website’s month of sporting English....
View ArticleCritical learnings: a competition
There’s a competition that might interest you on Macmillan Dictionary Blog today. I’ve written a parody of corporate communication laced with buzzwords, management jargon, ridiculous metaphors and...
View ArticleWeasel words and skunked words
Time for a recap of my recent writing at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. Near the end of April, I took a look at “skunked” words. This is a term I came across first in Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern...
View ArticlePreloved euphemisms
. This ad in the local freesheet Galway Advertiser caught my eye. I was interested not in the reconditioned washing machine but in the reconditioned adjective that begins the ad. Preloved (or...
View ArticleNeologisms, jargon, pragmatics and cant
Macmillan Dictionary Blog recently asked guest writers to choose their favourite “online English” word. I couldn’t pick a favourite, so I cheated and wrote about hashtags. What struck me most, though,...
View ArticleBook review: Sick English, by Janet Byron Anderson
Specialist language sometimes spreads beyond its initial domain and becomes part of common currency. From baseball we get home run; from jousting, full tilt. And from medical science we get syndrome,...
View ArticleA reactive defence of ‘proactive’
What is it about proactive that people hate so much? Some object to it on the grounds of superfluity, arguing (incorrectly) that it does nothing active isn’t already doing, um, actively. Others revile...
View ArticleBook review: ‘Who Touched Base in My Thought Shower?’ by Steven Poole
Of all the varieties of English routinely criticised for degrading the language, one is deplored so routinely it’s practically an international pastime. Call it management speak, business jargon,...
View ArticleTransporting the dear departed euphemisms
[Trigger warning if you're grieving, or sensitive about death.] Death is often called the great leveller; it’s also the great euphemised. I have a book on euphemisms with a full chapter devoted to it,...
View ArticlePompous language is a weapon
People have different motivations for using gobbledygook instead of plain language. They may wish to sound impressive and assume, incorrectly, that fancyisms trump familiar words. They may use it as a...
View ArticleFalconry terms in ‘H is for Hawk’
Revisiting T.H. White’s book The Goshawk last year brought back to me the peculiar lexicon of falconry: its austringer, keeper of goshawks; the creance used to leash hawks in training; and most...
View ArticleUnexplained jargon in fiction
I picked up this Richard Stark novel in a local second-hand bookstore and was attracted by the reviewers’ descriptions of its main character (click the photo to enlarge). Funny how repulsive can have a...
View ArticleBook review: Dent’s Modern Tribes, by Susie Dent
Jargon and slang get a bad press. In the right contexts, though, they serve an important communicative purpose, at the same time allowing users to express their identity as part of a community – and to...
View ArticleCybersecurity Style Guide is a useful editing tool
Most people reading this will have partial or passive familiarity with some terminology from programming, information security, and related domains, but they may have just a hazy grasp of how they’re...
View ArticleVerb all the things
Lauren Beukes’s novel Broken Monsters has a short passage on business jargon and young people’s attitudes to it. Layla, a character in her mid-teens, is visiting her friend Cas and introduces Cas’s...
View ArticleHistorical Dictionary of Science Fiction
Anyone who’s into both word lore and science fiction will have a fine time exploring the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. Call it cyberspacefaring.* Launched in early 2021, the HD/SF was once...
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