WORD COURT: Jargon writers alienate others

A good find in the detroit press.
November 12, 2005

BY BARBARA WALLRAFF

Karen Moore of Madison, Wis., writes: “I am an accountant. I recently encountered the following sentence, composed by a native English speaker, in an e-mail: ‘Facilities with surface transportation destinating at West Palm Beach P&DC should hold the mail at the origin facility until further notice.’ I am appalled that a corporation communicates with its professional clientele in such terms.”

Dear Karen: It may be worse than you think: Your correspondent didn’t write that sentence. It originated with the U.S. Postal Service, in a service update issued on Oct. 24, the day Hurricane Wilma hit Florida.

If you want to cut your correspondent a break, you could figure that he or she was afraid to change the postal service’s wording for fear of changing the meaning. But that’s not much of a reason to send weird jargon out into the wider world. People who don’t know what they’re telling other people should go find out before spreading the word.

If you want to cut the postal service a break, you might figure its staff was in no mood to weigh word choices while a hurricane was going on.

If you want to consider the broader issue, though, think about this: What’s wrong with bad English is that the people who write it aren’t paying attention to what they’re saying, or they’ve never learned to communicate well. Either way, the person who did the writing is making readers do work that he or she should have done. Readers have to stop and ask themselves, What’s this supposed to mean? and then puzzle it out: Ah, “destinating at” must mean “destined for” or “whose destination is.” And the “origin facility” is of course the “originating facility” or “the facility of origin.”

Sloppy writers used to appall me, too. But then I realized that they are telling us things about themselves they’d never tell us directly: They are hasty or inconsiderate, and they aren’t thinking clearly. Nowadays I feel more sorry for sloppy writers than horrified by them. Not only do they have trouble getting their points across but also they alienate people when they try.

Rita Agabashian of Livonia writes: “I keep hearing educated people say, ‘It’s deja vu all over again.’ Isn’t that redundant?”

Dear Rita: Yes, pretty nearly. In English “deja vu” originally meant an illusion that one had experienced something before when one really hadn’t. Strict constructionists still use “deja vu” only that way, though most people now use it for the feeling that something that did happen before is happening again, and dictionaries give that meaning.

As for “deja vu all over again,” it started out as a Yogi-ism — something funny that Yogi Berra, the beloved New York Yankees catcher, said. (Other Yogi-isms include “The future ain’t what it used to be,” “When you come to a fork in the road, take it” and “I really didn’t say everything I said.”)