Peter Jackson column

Oct 18 2007 by Iain Laing, The Journal

ACCORDING to the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, our troops in Iraq are currently engaged in “transitioning”.

Transitioning – that’s an interesting choice of word. I suppose the British soldiers in Basra are “transitioning” in the same way that Napoleon’s army transitioned its way back from Moscow.

I assume that the Air Chief Marshal – whose real name is Graham, but who mysteriously allows himself to be called Jock – learnt this strange way of speaking from his business acquaintances, for whom it is meat and drink.

They would also, no doubt, have impressed on him the virtues of “forward planning” and, I hope, would also have stressed the absolute importance of never confusing that with backward planning. We are all familiar with bullshit bingo, the game for spotting management-speak, but it doesn’t seem to have done anything to restrict its use. Not so very long ago a Cumbrian Tourist Board spokesman was telling Radio 4 Today listeners it was a shame there had been an outbreak of Legionnaires Disease in the county and that torrential rain had blighted the Blairs’ holiday there, because the county had some “wonderful brands”.

“What are those?” asked a merciless John Humphreys.

“The Lake District” was the reply.

But why do people do it? Is it because the mundane doesn’t sound important enough, so that in the 1970s and 1980s, trade union leaders, who were often poorly educated men desperately trying to sound learned, would portentously intone: “At this moment in time,’’ or, even worse, “At this present moment in time’’.

“Why not just say, ‘now’?’’ one wanted to scream at them.

Or maybe sometimes we use such language for the opposite reason. In the case of “transitioning” troops from a theatre of war where we are losing, or when “downsizing” a company by laying off staff, the truth is simply too painful to express in plain English. But sometimes, just sometimes, there can be a new expression which cuts right through the bull. My current favourite is “blamestorming”, which describes an impromptu gathering to work out who precisely is responsible for the current mess. I strongly suspect that Sir Jock Stirrup and his colleagues are currently engaged in a spot of blamestorming.

The truth is too painful to express in plain English