One of the many things I like about Today, the BBC’s venerable morning radio news programme, is its tradition of having the likes of Prince Harry, Angelina Jolie and Stephen Hawking guest edit over Christmas.
I was listening to the show last Monday when presenter Amol Rajan started talking about this year’s line-up. It included Olympic cyclist Laura Kenny and former chancellor Sajid Javid.
But I could barely concentrate on the rest of the names because I was so busy fuming over a word Rajan had used to introduce them.
“Every year”, he said, “the Today programme invites a series of guest editors to make an episode of Today with us around things that they are most interested in.”
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The battle around ‘around’ and other awful woolly words
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There it was. “Around”. A word that has somehow come to be used in a way that turns a crisp, forthright phrase into something evasive and slippery.
If I had heard a guest editor such as Kenny was going to make an episode “about” or “on” the impact elite sport has on women’s bodies, I would know precisely what she was planning. But the news she was going to do something “around” that topic suggests she could drift off into non-elite sport, or men’s bodies, or countless other things.
It is no accident that some of the biggest perpetrators of the misuse of “around” are those specialists in ambiguous non-statements, politicians.
Two days after the Christmas guest editor incident, Today aired an interview with the former Conservative party leader Iain Duncan Smith about the need for new rules to manage disruptive pupils.
“The range of change has to be pretty profound now – clear rules around what cannot happen,” he said.
I realise there are more important things to worry about and I do not mean to sound like the pedantic prig I clearly am. But the meaning of words matters, especially in a polarised world swamped with misinformation. Any language that obscures truth instead of revealing it is dubious.
This is why I also object to the way “piece” has wormed its way into places it has no business being in. Anyone who says they are working on the “defence piece” or the “climate piece” is telling you almost nothing. If they say they have just joined a counterterrorism think tank, or a carbon-trading firm, you would know where you were. Likewise, there is no excuse for using a woolly word such as “space”, as in “the defence space”, when perfectly good words such as “industry” or “sector” can do the job.
If you are under 40 and reading this, thinking, ‘What’s this sad old loser babbling on about?’, it is worth knowing how intensely words like this can irk the old losers who may soon be deciding whether to promote or hire you.
In the spirit of public service, I therefore urge you to think twice before talking around the work piece in any job space.
Also, beware of “reaching out” to anyone when you are actually just contacting them. It’s lazy and time-wasting. Better to spend an extra 10 seconds explaining that you want to follow up on something, or arrange a meeting, or whatever it is you are actually doing.
The same goes for “sharing” information that you are just “passing on”.
“Curate” is another word that has come to be used in tediously confusing ways to suggest something is far more important than it is, because it has been specially selected. It can usually be deleted. “A curated collection of exceptional reads” is almost always the same as “a collection of exceptional reads”.
I know this fight is hopeless. The reaching-out sharing curators of the language piece have well and truly won. As for the battle around “around”, forget it.
I realised this after sifting through the contents of my inbox one afternoon last week. In the space of 90 minutes, the Hay literary festival told me about a book that raised “new questions around what it means to be human” and a PR person wittered on about the “government’s recent announcement around increased boiler upgrade funding”.
A blogger said Thanksgiving was “a day that we’re supposed to centre around gratitude” and the estimable Chatham House think tank said, “North Korea’s rapprochement with Russia raises questions around the role of China.” Resistance, very obviously, is futile. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
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