Dead sentence

I have been reading Don Watson's Death sentence, in which he decries the shocking state of public language, as pedants are wont to do from time to time. Languages are always dying according to the pedants, despite the evidence of their flourishing that is to be seen and heard all around us.

Watson's point would be better made were he not himself in his way an awful writer. He is fluent enough -- although his sentences are not quite crisp -- but he clearly has no interest in properly structuring his argument and this tends to make his dreary whining hard to read.

He's not wrong about "managerial English". While googling to check that I wasn't the only person on this planet who thought that "human resources management" should have plural resources, I found this:

"HRMA is committed to fostering the enhancement of organizational outcomes through people.

Not quite Homer, eh? These people churn this bollocks out 24/7 and, Watson is right, it kills meaning. What on earth does that sentence actually say?

I see stuff like this all day, of course, because I am editing a management textbook. I plead with an uncaring world to give me better work -- perhaps to make of me a manuscript doctor, which I would excel at -- but it insists that I am fit only to do my best to make shit like that into English.

These people simply do not understand: language is first and foremost about communication. If your message needs deciphering, you need a new message. The BCHRMA's sentence is in code. It's not an English sentence. A reader is supposed to see the codewords: "committed" (that says we care), "fostering" (not actually making things happen but not getting in their way at least), "enhancement" (we add value, erm, sorry, another code word, "add value" means "add nothing of any actual value but something measurable", whoops, did it again, "measurable" means "you can write an incomprehensible report about it"), "organisational outcomes" (some vague idea that someone does something but the writer is too dim to know what; you might think that it means "make money" but very few companies actually make money, once you have noted that they have borrowed far more than they made in profits), "people" (workers). The reader understands: "we do fuck all but at least we don't do any damage, and the area we do fuck all in is blathering about other people's work".

So what do I edit it into? After I have stopped weeping with my head in my hands, I apply the golden rule, which is: you enhance nothing, you cunts. Yes, that's right. A bete noire, a bugaboo. I never allow "enhance" to stand. You improve, increase or magnify. You make better, you strengthen, whatever, but you will not enhance. I know that descriptively it means all those things. People say it. Yes, they do, but not in anything I edit.

(You may enhance if you are improving the quality of something. You can enhance pain by rubbing salt into your wounds because this changes its quality rather than improving the thing itself. You can enhance taste by adding salt because you do not change the taste but you make it more apparent.)

Usually I leave "fosters" because there is no real alternative for what is meant. I can't edit it to give the definition I suggested: BCHRMA does nothing much but at least doesn't fuck up organisational outcomes...

But in this case I can render the whole phrase down to "improve". "Is committed to" has to stay but if I were advising the organisation, I'd suggest avoiding the cliche and just putting "aims to improve" (yes, pedant people, it should be "aims at increasing" and sometimes I correct to that, if the whim takes me, but I wouldn't put it to someone this illiterate as a suggestion). "Organisational outcomes" is "what the organisation does". "Through people" is very elliptical. The writer means that his or her organisation aims at not fucking up companies' improving what they do by not making the workers a problem. So BCHRMA could have as its mission statement: BCHRMA aims to help improve what companies do by considering employee relations.

*sigh* Why bother? Why not just leave them in their world of incomprehensible bollocks? After all, anyone studying "management" probably deserves what they get.

Perhaps I'm human after all. Perhaps I hope that it will rub off on them and that piece by piece the world will become a more beautiful place, because it is more beautifully expressed.

Nah. It's because I do what I'm paid for, so far as I can be bothered. No more, no less.

posted by Dr Zen @ 12:08 pm