Blue sky thinking, pushing the envelope - the problem with office-speak is that it cloaks the brutal modern workplace in such brainlessly upbeat language...

I reached this sad conclusion early one morning a couple of weeks ago when listening to Farming Today. A man from the National Farmers' Union was talking about matters down on the farm and he uttered three "going forwards" in 28 seconds.

The previous radio record, by my reckoning, was held by Robert Peston, the BBC's business editor. He managed three going forwards in four minutes on the Today programme, but then maybe that wasn't such a huge achievement when you think that he spends his life rubbing shoulders with business people. And they say going forward every time they want to make any comment about the future, which is rather often. But for the farmer, who spends his life rubbing shoulders with cows, to say it so often represented a linguistic landmark. If the farms of England are now going forward, then there is no turning back for any of us.

I know I'm on slightly shaky ground talking on the radio about how badly other people talk on the radio. I'm also feeling a bit chastened having recently read a column by Craig Brown in the Telegraph consisting of spoof letters from language pedants. One of them went like this:

"Sir - Listening to my wireless, I heard a song with the chorus, 'She loves you yeah yeah yeah'. Later in the same song, insult was added to injury with yet another chorus, this time, 'She loves you yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah'. Whatever happened to that good old-fashioned word " yes"?

What was even funnier than his column was the readers' response to it on the Telegraph website. Most of them had quite failed to notice that they were being laughed at, and seized on the opportunity to voice their own concerns over declining standards of modern English. One took issue with the preposition "on", wailing over its use in "on the weekend" and "on the team". Another despaired over "for free". A third deplored "different to".

You could say this orgy of pedantry was not only tedious, but also pointless. Language changes. End of. - to use a particularly annoying new phrase. Yet protesting feels so good. Not only does it allow one to wallow in the superiority of one's education, but some words are so downright annoying that to complain brings relief. When someone says "going forward" it assaults the ears just as, when a colleague starts slurping French onion soup at a neighbouring desk, it assaults the nose.
Flinch mob
We all have our own pet hates - I don't particularly mind "for free": I think it's quite comic. Neither do I mind the preposition "on". But "up" - now that's another matter altogether. To free up and to head up, both deliver a little jolt of irritation whenever I hear them. And as for heads-up, as in give me a heads up, that is utterly maddening.

In any case, pedantry has a fine tradition.

Writing in The Tatler in 1710, Jonathan Swift complained, "I have done my utmost for some Years past, to stop the Progress of Mob... but have been plainly born down by Numbers, and betrayed by those who promised to assist me." Instead of saying mob, they should have used the proper Latin term mobile vulgus, mobile meaning changeable or fickle and vulgus meaning common people. Yet here I think Swift was being a fussy old bore in objecting to a harmless little bit of shortening. One syllable is surely a lot more manageable than five, so I really can't see what his problem was. And the word mob is so good it has survived the next three centuries with meaning unchanged.

By contrast there is so much more to object to in "going forward". It clings to the tongues of speakers compelling them to utter it again and again. It is a grown up equivalent of the word "like", which seems to trip off the tongue of the average teenager every two or three waking seconds.
Like "like", "going forward" is as contagious as smallpox. It started with business people, and now has not only infected farmers, it has reached epidemic proportions with footballers.

Hippie hangover
When asked if he was going to be the England captain again after his triumph with Trinidad and Tobago, David Beckham came out with the gnomic reply "Going forward, who knows." It seems that the less one has to say, the more likely one is to reach for a going forward as a crutch. Politicians find it comforting for this reason. "We are going forward" poor Hillary Clinton said just before the last, fatal primary last month when it became indisputable that she was going nowhere of the kind.

Yet more than all this, the really lethal thing about the whole language of business - is that it is so brainlessly upbeat. All the celebrating, the reaching out, the sharing, and the championing in fact grind one down. Several decades too late, it is as if business has caught up with the linguistic spirit of 1968. The hippies got over it, but businessmen are holding tight.

The reason that the talk jars so much is that the walk doesn't match. The reality is that business is the most brutal it has been for half a century. If your company is not better than the competition, it goes bust. If you aren't good, or aren't thought to be good (which is a slightly different thing) you get pushed aside.

For nearly a decade I wrote a fictional column in the Financial Times about a senior manager who spoke almost entirely in business cliches. Martin Lukes talked the talk. Or rather, he added value by reaching out and sharing his blue sky thinking. At the end of the day he stepped up to the plate and delivered world class jargon that really pushed the envelope. After eight years of being him I came to accept the nouns pretending to be verbs. To task and to impact. Even the new verb to architect I almost took in my stride. I didn't even really mind the impenetrable sentences full of leveraging value and paradigm shifts. But what still rankled after so long were the little things: that he said myself instead of me and that he would never talk about a problem, when he could dialogue around an issue instead.

Misplaced passion
Many of Martin's favourite phrases have recently found their way onto a list of 100 banned words that has been sent by the Local Government Association to Councils with the instruction that they are no longer to use them. It's a nice try, but I fear they are just as likely to succeed as I was with going forward.

Yet what no list of words can get at is the new business insincerity: a phoney upping of the emotional ante. Last week I got an e-mail from someone I had never met that began by saying "I'm reaching out to you" and ended "warmest personal regards". As her regards had no business to be either warm or personal, the overall effect was somewhat chilling.

But this incontinent gush is nothing compared to an e-mail sent by an extremely powerful person at JP Morgan encouraging his investment banking team to be more human. In it he said: "Take the time today to call a client and tell them you love them. They won't forget you made the call." Indeed. I'm sure the client would remember such a call for a very long time.

If love has no place in the language of business, neither does passion. Passion, says the dictionary, means a strong sexual desire or the suffering of Christ at the crucifixion. In other words it doesn't really have an awful lot to do with a typical day in the office - unless things have gone very wrong indeed. And yet passion is something that every employee must attest to in order to get through any selection process. Every one of the candidates in the final rounds of interview on the Apprentice solemnly declared that they were passionate about being Sir Alan's Apprentice.

It's not only when you're trying to impress nine million viewers on national TV. Even to get a humble job in a call centre passion is required. One of the big banks is currently advertising for such workers saying "we seek passionate banking representatives to uphold our values." This is a lie. Actually what the bank is seeking is competent people to follow instructions and answer the phones.

The biggest lie of all in business speak is about ownership. In order to make it appear that there is a strong bond between customers and companies there is My e-Bay and My EasyJet and - most successfully of all - Your M&S. At the risk of being as pedantic as Jonathan Swift, I'd like to point out that it isn't my M&S. It isn't yours either. Neither is it even Stuart Rose's M&S. The company belongs to its shareholders.

Though, just for the record, the knighthood Sir Stuart was given last week by the Queen really was his. Yet even that he deemed to be owned more broadly. It's not really for me, he said, it's for all M&S employees. I'm not quite sure what he was saying here, unless it was that everyone who works at Your M&S can call themselves Sir and Lady, going forward.

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