Pride, Archbishops and German football managers
Some things we’ve noticed about writing and English this week
Real-life Harrogate water drinkers caught off-guard in the street
I’m on a LNER train from York and I've got a bottle of Harrogate Spring Water in front of me. On the label, in fetching green caps, it says OUR BOTTLE IS PROUDLY MADE FROM OVER 50% RECYCLED PET.
It’s a stirring thought, all those people at the bottling plant, eyes shining, chests puffed out as they process their daily tonnages of polyethylene terephthalate. But I’m not sure we are meant to have such a picture in our heads. We are meant to think here is a company that is doing The Right Thing, and are justifiably proud of the fact.
The corporate appropriation of the word ‘pride’ and its variants is interesting.
For much of its life, Pride has not been A Good Thing. In the Christian tradition, it is a sin, one of the seven deadly varieties. Proverbially, it comes before a fall. So what organisation on earth would like to be be a seen as a sinful operation that’s about to go belly-up?
Plenty, because the word ‘pride’ has been reclaimed and rebranded. It began with activists and marginalised groups in society. Gay pride was, and is, a colourful, life-affirming and incredibly successful way of calling time on the years of shame and secrecy. Then pride took a long journey into the mainstream, culminating in 2000 with Heather Small’s anthemic hit, Proud.
What have you done today? I wrote a blog about feeling proud!
Now the corporate writers have gotten a hold of it good and proper. Linked In is just about the proudest place on Earth: just put in the hashtag #proud.
That’s fine when it’s people celebrating their promotions, awards, PhDs and just the fact that they proudly work with other passionate people.
Companies proudly serving pastries since 1997 or a proud part of the onshoring finance community? I don’t know, it sounds fake.
Still, well done Harrogate for recycling half of your PET. But hang on – what’s this? Though bottled at source, another, rather more discreet sentence on the label says it’s imported from Dublin. Surely my bottle of Yorkshire water I am drinking on a train in Yorkshire hasn’t been to Ireland and back? That wouldn't be something to be proud of.
A JD for the archbish
Try it one more time, Justin, but with more VIRTUE this time
Here’s a wry and dry put-down in The Economist’s Bagehot column. The piece is about a traditional spluttering you get in the ruling Conservative party whenever a member of the clergy dares to comment on politics. On this occasion, the Archbishop of Canterbury had disapproved of the Government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda:
One commentator accused the cleric of “virtue-signalling”, which is a decent summary of an archbishop’s job.
And it is, isn’t it?
Long sentences and Caps
A visual pun combining ‘sentences’ and ‘caps’
I recently came across this sentence in a corporate report:
For entrepreneurs, our Team offers Product Development, Supply Chain, Marketing and Behaviour Change Insight to help them evidence key new business models and deepen their impact by unlocking Consumer and Customer Drivers.
The sentence starts okay: the writer gets the verb (offers) in early; and we know who’s doing the offering and who’s getting offered something.
Then we get four specific things they’re offering. This is okay too. But then the sentence starts running off in several directions at once.
The writer needs to explain why these things matter. We get four verbs in quick succession: ‘help’, ‘evidence’, ‘deepen’ and ‘unlock’. And the objects of these verbs’ attention? ‘New business models’, ‘impact’ and ‘Consumer and Customer Drivers’.
A ‘key’ gets thrown in there too: there has to be a key, doesn’t there?
Ask yourself: where is the energy in this sentence? It’s like selling someone an apple – then the bowl, then the table, then the pie they might make and the fridge they might put it in.
And what’s with the caps?
“Our Team offers Product Development, Supply Chain, Marketing and Behaviour Change Insight to help them evidence key new business models and deepen their impact by unlocking Consumer and Customer Drivers…”
Only new business models (even though they are ‘key’) and the undeepened ‘impact’ – mixed metaphor alert, too – fail to get the caps treatment. You wonder what they've done wrong.
The writer wants us to think these Things are so important they deserve the treatment we’d give to proper nouns.
In the 18th century, this would have been fine: in those times, as in modern German, all nouns took capital letters. By the 20th century, Virginia Woolf was somewhat revolted by patriotic writers like Rudyard Kipling who used the caps lock key as a sort of verbal Viagra:
So with Mr Kipling’s officers who turn their Backs; and his Sowers who sow the Seed; and his Men who are alone with their Work; and the Flag – one blushes at all these capital letters as if one had been caught eavesdropping at some purely masculine orgy.
A Room of One’s Own, 1929
Corporate English writers, usually so keen to sound diverse, hip and accessible, are thus using a trick most popular when the world was at its most white, most privileged and most male.
Virginia Woolf: hands off the shift key, gentlemen
Now THERE’S a mission statement
I’ve written a fair bit about mission statements over the years – and written a few, too, for my sins. Most (mine included) are not worth the space in the bottom drawer they are consigned to.
But here is a beaut:
I really think this is a good place to be and a good place to join, if not a perfect place.
We want to offer emotion, we want to offer excitement, we want to be together with our people, we want to be really connected and we want to be special. We sit here now and in 20 years’ time we will look back and for all of us it’s about creating stories which we will remember easily and think ‘wow – that was good’.
Who wouldn’t work for that guy and be a part of his team? And doesn’t that capture what many – not all – of us want from a job: to feel you’re at THE place, that what you’re doing now is just… wow.
And who is this visionary corporate titan? He’s actually a football manager: Jürgen Klopp of Liverpool. And for Liverpool just now, things have never been wowier, which is saying something.
I’m completely biased: I have supported Liverpool all my life and have never been so excited by the team Klopp has put together.
If all mission statements could do this: Klopp and Thiago Alcântara
But whether you like football or not, or even if you support someone else – this stirs you up, doesn’t it? As Andy Last, a fellow Liverpool fan and, it so happens, the leading expert in purpose-driven communications in the UK, wrote when I sent this quote to him: ‘yes, I’d marry him too if he asked’.
In short – us
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