Beware the long arm of my slap

IWAS most impressed, a month or so ago, to read about the clever judge who sentenced a user of abusive language to a stint of work in a mortuary. The theory was that if he could learn to treat the dead with respect, he might transfer his new skills to the living world and no longer call people ugly names.

It made me wonder how we would punish those who abuse language itself. I’m not sure what kind of sentence could be imposed on individuals who mercilessly dangle participles and cruelly split infinitives. It might be a long sentence or a short one, depending on their transgression, but it should never end with a preposition.

Some of the most vicious crimes against words are committed in the workplace. I am not the only one who feels the pain of ground that is always being broken and paradigms that are always being shifted — not to mention the dislocation of skills that are always being transferred.

Lately I have been feeling particularly sorry for the tortured phrase “reach out”. When I hear of bosses reaching out to their employees or consultants reaching out to their clients, it makes me want to reach out and strangle someone.

“Reach out” is No 17 on the AOL Jobs list of 25 Most Hated Business Terms. (No 1 is “at the end of the day”, but let’s not even go there.)

It also appears on BBC Magazine’s list of the most despised Americanisms to have entered corporate culture in the global village (to list two more), and it is number 32 out of 45 on the Forbes list of most annoying business jargon. (No 1 is “core competency”, a phrase that makes no sense whatsoever, because surely organ- isations want their employees to be more than just competent? And if they are only competent at the core, what happens around the edges?)

But back to reach. It was born as a noun that meant a stretch of water and became a verb in the mid-1500s. The act of reaching comes from the same root as “rack”, the instrument of torture on which victims were stretched.

(The verb “retch”, incidentally, is about the same age as reach, but comes from the wonderfully onomatopoeic word hræcan , Old English for spitting or coughing up.)

The bottom line (oh dear, there’s another one), is that reaching out takes effort. Some philanthropic orders have “outreach programmes”. Although the backwards portmanteau word is an abomination against language, the people in these movements do indeed “reach out” in the proper sense of the phrase. They will put their arms down dark drainpipes in an attempt to pull out poor souls who have descended into all manner of despair.

As a child I had a small crush on David Gresham, the basin-haired presenter of Pop Shop. He would end each broadcast with the instruction: “Keep your feet on the ground and reach for the stars.” Annoying, perhaps, but at least accurate. Stars are far away. Touching them would take an uncomfortable feat of body extension.

When it comes to earthly creatures, however, there is hardly ever any need to “reach out” to them, unless they’ve slipped through a hole in the ice and you need to lie on the edge and stretch your arms out to save them. That would be a valid case of reaching. Calling a farmer to sell him a hoe is not reaching out. It’s just calling.

Reaching out is much more arduous than tapping a few keys on a phone or keyboard. You can contact someone, visit them, e-mail them, or even (if you must) set up a meeting with them. But please do not call it reaching out. Perhaps the rack would be an appropriate sentence for this offence. LS