Mark Mason

Check yourself: have you succumbed to this corporate speak epidemic?

Soon the day will arrive when someone asks ‘Would it be OK if myself puts yourself on hold?’

You know how it goes with corporate speak. A strange new habit grows and spreads, creeping largely unnoticed into the language, until one day you hear a sentence so bizarre, so divorced from normality, that it brings you up short. It happened to me the other day. A call centre operative, in the middle of a prolonged display of not being able to help, had to check something with a colleague. Before doing so she said: ‘Would it be OK if I put yourself on hold?’

Just stop and consider that sentence for a moment. ‘Would it be OK if I put yourself on hold?’ The woman who uttered it was once, I’m sure, a normal little girl, learning to speak. She would have got things wrong in the endearing way all toddlers do: ‘goed’ instead of ‘went’, ‘embeloke’ instead of ‘envelope’ and so on. But I bet she never once, in the furthest extremities of surreality that such mistakes can explore, uttered a sentence as absurd as ‘Would it be OK if I put yourself on hold?’

Call centre staff only have themselves to blame. (Note correct use of a ‘self’ word there.) They start saying these things in a desperate attempt to hide their ineptitude. ‘If I throw in some extra words,’ goes the thinking, ‘and use posh-sounding phrases instead of simple ones, this poor sap on the other end of the line might not notice that I am, in fact, about as much use as John Bercow in a basketball team.’ Lawyers have been doing this for centuries, with their heretofores and parties of the first part. But at least they get it right. Call centre staff don’t. They end up making mistakes like ‘yourself’ when they actually mean ‘you’.

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