I’m settling down after lunch when the careless girl at the switchboard puts Guratsky through.
‘Good afternoon; sorry if I woke you.’
‘No need to apologize, Tom, the phone was ringing anyway… Congratulations, by the way. How’s it working out?’ (Doberman & Pinscher has won the account for a leading firm of word brokers, and our friend, Guratsky, has been named vice president, semantic services.)
‘It’s an exciting assignment. Right now I’m rationalizing our word production.’
‘What does that mean exactly?’
‘Well, our new Honeywell told us the other day that there’s been a hundred and forty percent increase in the exchange of words over the past two years. Now that’s even more than the unadjusted national inflation rate. It’s clear we have to take action here at the Word Factory.’
‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read on a computer print-out, Tom. These younger generation computers are always out to kid you. Besides, they’ve no respect for the language.’
‘I know you’re prejudiced. Ever since that female Honeywell second-guessed you at that Harvard seminar. But even you should be concerned with the tremendous increase in the number of cheap, mass-produced words and ready-made epithets and phrases going into circulation. Of course, the government is largely to blame. At a time of raging inflation and high unemployment all they can do is to release more words – like printing semantic money. An utterly cynical, “let them eat words” attitude. It wouldn’t be so bad if they were minting new expressions; but all they could do was to release the same old hackneyed ones; whole paragraphs, even speeches get recycled.
‘Of course, industry is consuming many more words than before. For example, company reports need to be more verbose in order to compensate for declining profits. Marketing plans have become book length as their contents become more dubious. And in the advertising game, long body copy looks like it’s here to stay.’
‘Sounds pretty dismal, Tom. What’s the prognosis?’
‘Serious: radical measures need to be taken. It’s clear the language is being ruthlessly diluted. If words are to keep their value, they must be used more sparingly; which means more thoughtfully. The problem is that word production cannot keep pace with world demand; there are so many more people using English today. We must arrest this profligate exploitation of a vital natural resource. Quite apart from world pollution, the nation cannot sustain the present rate of consumption.’
‘Very eloquent, Tom; public spiritedness is a welcome new side to your character. I would have thought, though, that English is still a fairly stable language. After all, we still have a favorable balance of words.’
‘
‘Yeah, but that’s not really the point. Sure, we export a lot of words. But on the other hand, But, on the other hand, the market has been flooded with Latin roots. Another thing. We’ve just done computerized “vocabulary prints’ of a number of well-known people. Very revealing. For all their prolixity, some of these people are virtual cripples. Wordwise. Walking around with a puny vocabulary of a few hundred words – recycled, of course, thousands of times a day.’
‘Well, what’s the answer, Tom? Is Doberman & Pinscher going to run around snapping at the heels of wayward word spenders?’
‘Very funny. We’ve developed a two-point program called “semantic rearmament.” First, we’re going to cut our total word production by fifty percent. Second, we plan to rehabilitate a lot of good, old words, and generally build better quality phrases for our customers. The keynote will be brevity. Texts will definitely be shorter this year.’
‘I’m impressed, Tom. But assuming you succeed in reducing inflation, won’t you be contributing to the unemployment problem? After all, you’ll be throwing quite a few of your wordsmiths out of work.’
‘On the contrary. We’re actually hiring new wordsmiths. Don’t forget – shorter texts take longer to write; we evaluate our writers by the number of words they leave out.’
‘I think I understand. What can I do for you?’
‘Go back to sleep. I’ll put our spring catalogue in the mail. We’re having a special sale of cheap second-hand expressions that might interest you.’
Roger Collis 1971 Werbung/Publicite
[This is an archive story from a collection of about 100 which I am including in my new book, ‘Management Man.’] www.rogercollis.co.uk