More fun with language

Jan. 10, 2005
More fun with language This column, which has been called Journally Speaking since the late Henry Ralph invented it in 1948, provokes a great range of response from readers.

This column, which has been called Journally Speaking since the late Henry Ralph invented it in 1948, provokes a great range of response from readers.

No surprise, this. The Journally Speaking column covers more topics than any section of Oil & Gas Journal. It also has more writers. OGJ staff editors take turns writing it.

Indeed, the column exists for the sake of variety. It's a showcase for subjects that wouldn't find their ways into other parts of the magazine. It lets OGJ writers experiment with styles and approaches they can't employ elsewhere. It allows them to entertain for a change, rather than just inform—or at least try. If nothing else, it's a chance to strap on the language like a gleaming new sports car and take it for a 700-word spin.

What is surprising is the subject to which readers most frequently and enthusiastically react. That's "subject" without an "s." In this writer's experience, one subject generates more response than any other two combined: the English language.

Because language is their business, writers and editors notice usage foibles and corrosive habits and find perverse joy in hoisting popular lapses aloft for ridicule. This editor does, at any rate. And every time he has done so in this column, the phone has rung, the mailbox has filled, and—in more recent years—the e-mail queue has deepened by several screen lengths.

Language, you see, is outrageously fun.

So here goes again: three barbarisms you should avoid like $10/bbl oil but probably do not.

Grow the company.

Who let this weed flourish in the garden? You can grow in the sense that you become taller, or—sorry—fatter. You can grow corn or—sorry again—warts. But you can't grow a company.

You might expand or enlarge one. Or, thanks to your superior cunning and shrewd management, your company might grow and be properly said to have done so. But you, wizard of commerce that you are, cannot grow it. So quit saying you do.

You can't grow revenues either, by the way, and if you could you would look smarter saying "revenue" instead of "revenues," as everybody else does these days. Have you ever tried counting "revenues" in the sense of "one revenue, two revenues, three revenues"?

Going forward.

Fad phrases come and go, but this monster arrived with a suitcase in each paw and set up messy housekeeping in the very midst of business communication. People jam it anywhere they like into sentences to indicate some vague thing about the future. "Going forward, profits look better next year," they say. Or, "We'll see improvements going forward."

One of many problems with this clinker is that it's unnecessary. English equips its verbs with full sets of tenses, several of which indicate action in the future. A well-rendered sentence needs no navigational aid, especially one that makes no sense. "Going" has to do with movement through space, not time. You wouldn't overdress a past-tense sentence like this: "Going backward, profits rose last quarter." Or would you?

Another reason to banish going forward from English usage is that people deploy it as a participial phrase with no thought about an antecedent. You probably don't want to read why this ought not be done. Trust me: The offense is grievous.

On the ground.

This one emerged from the linguistic ooze, probably on the stern lips of military officers, about the time of the Persian Gulf War of 1991. "We have 10,000 troops on the ground," they'd say, meaning "in the theater of operation." Now the phrase turns up everywhere.

A company building a petrochemical plant has several hundred people on the ground at the construction site. An individual on a trip is on the ground at his or her destination.

Well, where else would these folks be? We humans are ground dwellers. By nature, we're nearly always on the ground and spend relatively little time in the air or in the water, the only fundamental alternatives.

Describing people as on the ground doesn't communicate much. If George is in Cleveland, he's probably on the ground there or soon will be. Just say he's in Cleveland.

So, going forward, feel free to grow my e-mail queue about any of this. I'll be on the ground waiting to hear from you. Or, in my 10th floor office, am I really in the air?