Category Archives: Corporate communications

Your health!

While reading group’s on hold, I’ve been reading a few books too long to get on the list – Anna Karenina currently. Never having read Tolstoy, I can immediately see why he’s so revered. Wonderful writing. He’s even given me a new word I hadn’t come across:  arbeitskur.

From one brother to another, after the latter returns from a day labouring in the field with the peasants. But what does it actually mean?

In other words, the idea that there is some health/therapeutic benefit to be had from a programme of honest physical toil. Which strikes me as eminently plausible.

Long as it’s clear

How long can a sentence be? The Gunning Fog Index gives this bit of Tolstoy…

…a rating of 17.73 – the number representing the number of years’ education a person would typically need to understand a given piece of text – yet in truth, this would be perfectly clear for anyone with even a basic grasp of written English. Showing yet again, if there was ever any doubt, that if the writing’s good enough, length really isn’t an issue.

Do wot mate?

Re-reading Stella Gibbons’s masterly Cold Comfort Farm, I was struck by the richness, not to say  ‘foreignness’ – of the English spoken down in darkest Sussex:

Gibbons is enjoying herself! Nevertheless, it seems likely that the English she captures was actually prevalent in parts of rural England as recently as the ’30s (when the story is set). I think it extremely unlikely that much of it survives today, after nearly a century of the levelling powers of radio and, more particularly, television.

Arguably communication will be the gainer – clarity and character are often, sadly, at odds – but it does seem rather a shame. You can’t help but wonder how much regional dialect will survive, say another century, or whether we will all, by 2120, be conversing (if not in Mandarin) in a flavourless if functional mid-Atlantic commodity-English. Or, to put it another way, American.

(Staggering typo-count, in passing – three in just that one para, for example – so much so, that I was moved to make a little YouTube vid about it.)

Come again?

This is getting to be a habit: coming across ads whose promise is entirely hidden from me.

I could google, of course, and find out what a 3D scan is (for starters), but as it stands the only message this banner conveys to me is my own cultural obsolescence. Oh well, whatever a 3D scan is, I’m pretty sure I don’t need one, and I’m sure the assets will continue to trend with or without my comprehension.

Say what?

No great originality in grumbling about inflated/nonsensical job titles – standard issue grump – but I was struck by the sign off on a recent letter from my pension provider:

What did whoever came up with that lulu even imagine they meant by it? ‘Insurance Customer Delivery’? This is a pension, not insurance. And where does delivery come into it? Are they delivering customers now? Where to? It’s palpable nonsense, and indicative of a level of intelligence and imagination I for one am a tad dismayed to find in the company supposedly looking out for my future finances.

Does it matter? Not much, probably. To quote ‘er indores, “You’re probably the only person who’d even notice.” Maybe she’s right. But I can’t help feeling that smart companies should watch their words no less carefully than they look after their customers’ money. People might think they don’t know what they’re on about – not a good look, whatever business you’re in.