Mind your language
IF you do not want to read a word that the Oxford English Dictionary tells me is `not in polite use', then look away now and skip to the second paragraph. It is just that Sir Richard Wilson was asked on telly last week if he would say tal- locks' to Mr Tony Blair. He said 'Yes', and went up in my estimation.
Sir Richard is the head of the Home Civil Service and as such wrote a letter to the Financial Times. A reader, Philip- pa Morris, saw it on a flight to Australia. (In these circumstances one does things such as turning to the Letters column of the FT.) I am glad she did. It is a corker.
The subject is a Civil Service 'consul- tation on a statement of vision and val- ues'. 'I am looking forward,' Sir Richard writes, 'to how my colleagues from across government respond.' That merely sounds un-English. You would not say, 'I look forward to how big you are.' Normally you might bung in a gerund: 'I look forward to seeing how big you are.'
No matter. 'You might also have reported,' Sir Richard goes on, 'what I told your correspondent two weeks ago, that equality and diversity was a key item.' Why was? Is it because of the preceding what or the subsequent a?
`We unanimously committed the ser- vice to do better on diversity in every department.' Well, we could all do bet- ter on diversity, if we knew how.
`We will publish the key points and move without delay to build on the great strides which the Civil Service has already made.' Building on great strides is diversity with a vengeance.
Is this all meant to be a joke by Sir Richard, a parody of Civil Service offi- cialese? Is it a bid for the return of Sir Ernest Gowers?
A bad sign is the presence of the word key, twice. (The whole letter is less than 200 words long.) At least Sir Richard did not use key predicatively. In local government and academia, this usage is a sure sign of walled-off idiocy, in sentences such as: 'Concerns around health and safety are key.'
I am not attacking Sir Richard Wil- son. Perhaps he had flu. But if anyone is going to cut through Blairite verbal undergrowth, he must tidy his own gar- den first.
Dot Wordsworth
Previous page
