A plague on the word inflation that’s turned our dustmen into disposal technicians and dinner ladies into refreshment supervisors

Monty Don, the tV gardener over whom the nation’s female population swoon, has expressed his annoyance at being called a ‘horticulturalist’.

And, he says, the term is gaining traction: ‘“Horticulturalist” is now widely used to describe a gardener as an unnecessary inflation. not the same thing at all.’

He’s right, of course. they are different. the scientists and botanists at gardens such as Kew in West London, for example, are horticultural ists. the person digging over the vegetable patch or mowing the lawn is a gardener.

‘When I see a spade, I call it a spade,’ declares Cecily in oscar Wilde’s immortal comedy the Importance of Being Earnest, provoking a bitter riposte from London society girl Gwendolen: ‘I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade.’

And, nowadays, it seems fewer and fewer people can recognise a spade, much less admit that is exactly what is in front of us.

the inventors of absurd job titles seem to belong to an alternative universe, in which it might seem impolite to give a job title which conveys what a person does.

So it is that the dustbin man becomes a ‘waste manager and disposal technician’ or even, in one local council area, ‘environmental maintenance officer’.

At a firm in Cheshire, the ladies serving chips, or perhaps nutritious salads, in the office canteen have been reclassified as ‘refreshments and nutrition supervisors’.

My guess is that, like so many such fads, it all started in America, a land prone to brightly lit overstatement.

It was there that it was decided that the clerk, or assistant, in an Apple Store, helping you with some computer glitch, should be labelled a ‘ Genius’. Use such a

With the arrival of HR, gobbledegook became widespread

Royal Mail is now looking for a ‘postperson’

term for one of these helpful geeks, and what is left should Albert Einstein walk into the store?

Likewise, in a Subway fast-food outlet, you will find that the person making up your lunch of turkey on rye with mayo is named not a waiter or a cook but a ‘sandwich technician’.

you will be expected to find the sandwich ‘awesome’ or ‘ epic’ — which, again, will leave you lost for words if you are searching for an adjective to describe the music of Bach or the poetry of Homer.

Overstatement is simply part of the American way of looking at the world.

Equally, in that land of sunshineoptimism, the sad facts of life are swathed in such layers of euphemism as to be unrecognisable.

Just as in their funeral parlours the dead are made up to resemble drag queens, with rouge and lipstick, so, too, are disagreeable facts of life, such as that people at work sometimes get the sack, presented as almost happy.

the firm is ‘ having to let people go’, or it is faced with the exciting prospect of ‘ restructuring the workforce’, so it will offer those it intends to chop a ‘ career- change opportunity’ or a ‘negotiated departure’.

I may be wrong about it starting in America. there have been plenty of people in Britain who, like Wilde’s Gwendolen, liked to speak as if they had never seen a spade.

the British playwright John osborne — who also wrote some of the funniest memoirs in our language (Almost A Gentleman)

— made his mother into one of the greatest comic figures in literature. She worked in a pub, but liked to say: ‘I’m not a barmaid. I’m a victualler’s assistant.’

that was back in the 1950s, and it was not long before rat-catchers became ‘ rodent officers’, the bookies became ‘turf accountants’, the hairdressers became ‘tonsorial artists’ and dog-catchers became ‘canine control officers’. We still had holidays in caravans, before they became mobile homes.

those who had a washing-up job could be dignified as the ‘utensil management team’, though it did not improve their pay.

With the arrival of HR (‘Human Resources’) the gobbledegook became widespread.

It was surely the HR people, and not train drivers, ticket inspectors, stokers or station masters, who introduced all the new language to describe the railways.

Now we sit in the cramped train and a voice tells us that it is the train Manager speaking (once the Guard). the tea lady has become an at-seat trolley service which will be discontinued, not at the next station — a word we all know — but, in the modern gobbledegook tautology, the next ‘station stop’.

Did no one tell them in HR that a station is a stop?

the last time I travelled on GWR, the nice person trundling the trolley of tea bags and potato crisps through the carriage was described as a ‘ catering manager’.

In Britain, there are two lots of people in employment. there are those of us who do something — whatever silly title some people might attach to our activities — and there are the time-wasting, money-wasting administrators.

the rat- catchers, the bookies, the train drivers, the doctors and nurses, the barbers, the journalists, the police, the dinner ladies and the undertakers are all doing what they are paid to do, to the best of their abilities.

But there is a whole other gang of people who are not doing anything, except what they would regard as essential administration.

For example, more than half of those employed in the nHS are not doctors, nurses or hospital cleaners, they are ‘ administrators’.

It is these management geeks, the HR brigade, who think up all these silly names for jobs, while concealing the fact that their own positions are, for the most part, completely unnecessary.

I somehow do not think it was an actual fireman who dispatched a plaintive tweet about the children’s show Peppa Pig after it failed to use the ‘ correct’ term: ‘ Firefighter’.

‘Come on @peppapig, we’ve not been firemen for 30 years. you have a huge influence on kids and using out- of- date stereotypical gender-specific wording prevents young girls from becoming firefighters,’ the London Fire Brigade complained. Poor old Fireman Sam inevitably found himself dragged into the disagreement, too.

It is, of course, a debatable point. Did the Fire Brigade fail to recruit enough female firefighters in the past because the girls had all been put off doing the job by watching Fireman Sam cartoons?

Or did the cartoon, when it was made, reflect the plain demographic fact that most firefighters were male — as they still are?

Similar deep questions hover around the employment of Postman Pat, whose lyrics are now discouraged in some quarters.

I have been looking through the recruitment advertisements for jobs in Royal Mail and the postal service and see that they are now looking for a ‘ postal delivery worker’ or simply a ‘postperson’.

Fair enough. no one would deny that a woman is just as capable as a man of shoving some junk mail through a letter box.

But ‘Pat’ is a name which can be borne by men, women and nonbinary people, so Postperson Pat, or Delivery officer Pat, could have been ambivalent in their identity all along.

Monty Don has done right to say he is a gardener and not a horticulturalist.

We do not need to disguise what we do for a living or to give fancy names to useful activities.

Let’s hope that the other gardeners follow his lead, and that Gardeners’ Question time is never changed to a Horticulturalists’ Sharing Session.

Let the waste manager go back to being a dustman, and the refreshment supervisors to being dinner ladies.