I have movied, Christmased and piered – into a verbal abyss
If you work in an office, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. You’ll have been asked to action something, or to inbox someone, or perhaps even to whiteboard some ideas. You will, in short, know the horror of verbing: the corporate world’s insistence on forcing innocent, defenceless nouns to serve, against their will, as verbs.
It isn’t just business people who do it, though. Political types do, too. Take Kellyanne Conway, a senior aide to Donald Trump. This week, she urged Americans to celebrate small independent shops – because, she wrote, they “engine our economy”.
I, for one, was utterly repugnanced. I almost sicked. She’d completely nonsensed. Language is supposed to communication our thoughts. It should clarity them. Using “engine” as a verb won’t information your readers. It will only fury them.
Of course, it’s not always wrong to conversion a noun to a verb. In fact, we choice it a lot, and mostly it successes. We email a friend, eye a foe, chair a meeting or highlight a problem. We blog. We text. We party.
Some verbings, though, are simply ugly, and we must opposition. We are not going to restaurant our spouses, beer our friends, or dialogue our opponents. And when an Olympic commentator tells us that an athlete has medalled, or podiumed, we’re going to action the off switch.
I just hope Kellyanne Conway attentions.
In an interview with GQ magazine, Jeremy Corbyn admits that he can’t remember the last film he saw, and says he never goes to the cinema. I used to be the same. I didn’t go to the cinema from one year to the next. But now I’ve started going with my three-yearold son – and I love it. But not because of the films.
Last weekend we went to see Paddington 2. It was good. But for me the joy lay not so much in watching the film, but in watching my son watch it. How tiny he looked, perched in the middle of that huge plush seat, his little face glowing in the glare of the screen – and how rapt his unblinking gaze. “Poor Paddinton!” he would whisper, every time our hero got into trouble. “Poor Paddinton!”
He had a great time. Afterwards I asked him which bit of the film he’d enjoyed most. He contemplated the question deeply, then delivered his verdict.
“Paddinton,” he said.
On the subject of my son: in last week’s column I wrote about the difficulty of choosing Christmas presents for a child who insists he wants only one. My son has set his heart, for unknown reasons, on “a green watch”, and refuses to countenance any other suggestions.
I’ve been glad to learn that I’m not alone. On Thursday, during a visit to Finland, the Duke of Cambridge presented a local Santa Claus with a Christmas list written by four-year-old Prince George. It featured only a single entry: “POLICE CAR”. The Cambridges have my sympathies. Then again, given his parents’ considerable financial means, it may be that the Prince is asking not for a toy police car, but a real one, complete with his own personal policeman to drive him around, while the Prince shouts “NEE NAW NEE NAW I’M GOING TO CATCH THE BADDIES” out of the window.
If I were Santa, I would urgently call the Palace to clarify. Letting down a future king would not be a wise move.
It’s often said that people grow more Right-wing as they get older. There can be few better examples of this than Kingsley Amis.
Files declassified this week reveal that MI5 kept the author of Lucky Jim under surveillance for 20 years, because as a student in the early 1940s he’d joined the Oxford branch of the Communist Party. (His Selected Letters, published in the year 2000, opens with the teenage Amis scolding a former comrade for having the temerity to leave “the Party”.)
Any fears that MI5 may have had about Amis growing up to lead a Marxist revolution, however, proved unfounded.
After he became a bestselling author, his political pronouncements grew less and less Left-wing. By the Eighties, the one-time Communist was among Margaret Thatcher’s most ardent supporters. And it wasn’t only her policies he admired. “One of the best-looking women I had ever met,” he panted in his memoirs. “Remarkable… [She] can trap me for split seconds into thinking I am looking at a science-fiction illustration showing the beautiful girl who has become President of the Solar Federation in the year 2220… She has replaced the Queen as my dream girl…”
He was, it seems, about as Tory as it’s possible to be. Then again: what if all this gushing was just a cunning ploy, to put MI5 off his scent?
They’re very sophisticated, these Russian bots. Sad to hear the news about Hastings Pier. It seems to be cursed. Seven years ago it was almost destroyed by fire. In 2016, after £14million of work, it finally reopened – and last month won the Riba Stirling Prize, the grandest accolade in British architecture. Yet now the charity that owns it has entered administration.
I visited the pier only a few weeks ago, during a short family holiday. There was a lovely little exhibition about the pier’s history, and the rock gigs it once hosted: Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Who. A photograph showed a silhouetted flock of birds circling the ruin after the 2010 fire. It was accompanied by a beautiful quote from Phil Gill, a musician who’d played there with his band Stallion.
“We stood on the promenade and watched the starlings fly through the twisted shell of what was left of the ballroom,” he said. “It looked to me like all the music that was contained in the ballroom, all the musical notes, were flying out, trying to find somewhere to go.”