Working too hard?
How an innocent little word turns out to be the favourite defensive weapon of under-fire politicians and corporations
Credit: Forthwrite friend and follower Jill Kluge
Next time you’re watching a press conference or listening to a minister or health expert being interviewed, listen out for a particular word.
That word is ‘working’.
Then note the various ways that word is used. ‘We’re working very hard with X’. ‘We’re working tirelessly with Y’. In extreme situations, you may even hear ‘we’re working around the clock to do Z’.
And here’s a suggestion. Every time the word pops up, hear a siren. The UK Government wants us to stay alert. Well, if I hear – and I am bound to, several times a day – that word ‘working’ I’m alert to the fact the speaker is in bad trouble. Something has gone wrong. If they say they’re working tirelessly with someone or something to do something that’s not yet been done – you know something isn’t, well, working.
There was a fine example in England earlier this week when it was revealed that 400,000 police record had been deleted. The home secretary was duly wheeled out to pose with some coppers on a bridge. The standard answer was duly wheeled out too: ‘experts are working flat out to fix the issues,’ said Priti Patel.
I’m not making a party political point here. All politicians do it; so do most CEOs. I just want to understand why the spin doctors choose the working way to avoid difficult questions.
Let’s look at the grammar first. ‘Working’ is a present participle. That means it’s describing a continuing progress: an ‘ongoing situation’, if you want to put it that way (I don’t).
Think of your local authority. I bet they present-participle for all they’re worth. They’re ‘Working to build a brighter borough’ or ‘Working for the people of Bogglesworth, all day, every day’.
Here’s what’s wonderful about a present participle, especially if you are in power or run a company. It says you are doing something. It doesn’t commit you to a date, a target, or anything much at all. It just surrounds your pronouncements with a warm, buzzy air of honest activity.
When we are advising clients on their business proposals, we favour the future tense. We will transform X or create Y. That’s scary. You’ll be held to your promise. So you’d better mean what you say.
But there’s another aspect of ‘working’ that intrigues me. It has the ring of humble, unflashy commitment. Who can fault a hard worker, even if they may not have achieved the most stellar results?
That’s why under-pressure football managers reach for ‘working’ too. You’ve lost your last 10 games and the fans are calling for your head. But it’s okay, because ‘the lads are working really hard on the training ground’. You then lose 5-0, but you can’t fault their effort.
I don’t know if the reverence for the solid, plugging-away and above all hard worker is a peculiarly British thing. I suspect so. Certainly in football. Compare the way the brilliant, but rather aloof and unengaged Merzit Ozil of Arsenal was treated compared to, say, Liverpool’s Andy Robertson. In this clip, Robertson doesn’t touch the ball once. There’s no skill here, just honest, lung-busting effort. And it made him a hero:
The Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn saw itself as the defender of working people. Perhaps one of the reasons that strategy failed is its old-fashioned quaintness. I felt we were back in the days of top-hatted mine-owners and feckless aristocrats living off the labours of others. Do accountants not work hard? Management consultants? Advertising executives? They do, sometimes to the death (especially in Japan). Yet ‘the working class’ is still used to denote a particular, and shrinking, segment of society.
Still, the Conservatives also felt they needed to put ‘working’ to work. The former Prime Minister David Cameron (a former spin doctor) rarely made a speech without championing ‘hard-working families’. In 2015, it was named our Most Loathed Political Cliche.
A final grammatical point. As well as a verb, ‘working’ works as an adjective. ‘The treatment is working’: working describes something that’s doing what it’s meant to, functioning properly. I suspect politicians and their scriptwriters are fully aware of that echo. They might use working in the verbal sense, but they probably won’t mind very much if you hear ‘working’ (the adjective) when they’re talking about their efforts to, say, beat a pandemic.
You don’t get that useful ambiguity in other languages. In French, you’d say ‘ça marche’ for ‘that works’ – literally, it walks. That gives access to another sort of political rhetoric: so the French President’s party becomes En Marche, while in Italy Silvio Berlusconi created Forza Italia.
I don’t think a new British party would get far with We’re off! or Let’s Go, UK!
Try Working for Britain instead. I’m lovin’ it…
Three takeaways, please…
Review the present participle verbs in your text. Would it sound stronger and more confident if they became ordinary present, past or future tenses?
‘Working’ is fast becoming a political cliché. Lots of people work hard: don’t use the word to signal that you’re especially industrious. You want to know what working tirelessly round the clock looks like? Watch current footage of health professionals at work in A&E departments.
Forthwrite: working towards effective writing solutions. Forthwrite: make your writing work harder. Which sounds clearer? Perhaps you find the second example too abrupt?
Letter in the Financial Times, 20 September
Forthwrite’s Grammatically Acceptable Hit Songs
Vampire Weekend
Warning: there’s a bad word in the first line of this song from Vampire Weekend’s eponymous 2008 album.
Who gives a fuck about an Oxford Comma?
Songwriter Ezra Koenig, an English major at Columbia and sometime teacher, was taking aim at a university group called The Society for the Preservation of the Oxford Comma.
So what is an Oxford Comma – and should we give a thingy about it?
The Oxford comma is not used in most English-speaking countries, such as England, Scotland and Australia. However, if you are writing in, say, Chicago, New York, and Oxford, you should put one in.
Did you see the supplementary squiggle after ‘New York’? That’s the serial, or Oxford comma.
There’s a huge debate about whether the Oxford comma resolves ambiguities (Wikipedia does a good job explaining it).
As I am British and not published by the Oxford University Press, I don’t use the serial comma: and I think the copy looks cleaner for it. I’m also with the British writer on writing, Lynne Truss, who says ‘There are people who embrace the Oxford comma, and people who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken.’
Some grammar battles are worth fighting. Many – like this one – really aren’t. Great song, though.
The fast-evolving Forthwrite playlist is here. We’re up for requests.
An extract from our Writer’s Guide
B is for ‘but’
We have no problem with using either a ‘but’ or an ‘and’ at the beginning of sentences; some people do mind, though they’re a dwindling group.
It’s one of those rules that somehow became embedded in the British school system in the past century. But it’s hard to find a solid basis for that rule in good grammar. And in all serious as well as mainstream media, you’ll find sentences that kick off with a conjunction.
Writers on writing
The element of surprise is the most important thing and what keeps me interested in writing. I can feel it if I've written that predictable or boring line, and I will carry that around with me all day.
Phoebe Waller Bridge
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