Let’s rise up against the verbal vandals who reach out to tell us, like, they’re not gonna lie. End of!

WHEN was the last time you heard a politician of any party mention the NHS without prefacing its initials with that little word ‘our’? It’s driving me mad. In everyday conversation, surely, most of us use the definite article, as I’ve just done.

After all, you don’t hear many people saying they had an operation on ‘our NHS’. They call it ‘the NHS’. Only politicians insist on the possessive pronoun.

It’s obvious why they do it, of course. The word ‘ our’ has a protectively affectionate ring to it, as in the northern expression ‘our kid’, with perhaps a touch of reverence, as seen in references to the Virgin Mary as Our Lady.

The idea is to convey the impression that they care deeply about the NHS, remind us that it belongs to us all and convince us that they share our love and respect for it. These are all innocent enough motives, no doubt, but I find ‘our NHS’ an intensely irritating expression, uttered in a bid to manipulate us.

It makes me want to chuck things at the telly every time I hear it.

Maddening

Now, you may well argue that, these days, we have many more important things to worry about than an annoying use of a three-letter word. I’m thinking of such matters as the cost of living crisis, the collapse of public services, the threat of nuclear war over Ukraine and the scaremongers’ claim that if we keep burning fossil fuels, one day in the nottoodistant future mankind will be burned to a crisp by global warming.

It’s just that the older I get (I’ll turn 70 in the autumn), the more infuriating I find minor irritations that, let’s face it, don’t matter much in the great scheme of things. And nowhere is this more true than where words are concerned.

Indeed, if I were less tongue-tied and camera-shy, I would be an ideal candidate to appear in a revival of the BBC series Grumpy Old Men, in which men of a certain age sounded off about their pet gripes. My only problem, apart from my terror of appearing on TV, would be knowing where to begin.

Well, at least I have the comfort of knowing I’m far from alone in getting steamed up about maddening words and phrases in increasingly common currency.

Mumsnet, the website for parents, set the ball rolling last month, when somebody posted the comment: ‘Late shift so can’t sleep and this has been bugging me. Loads of examples I am sure but the two that are currently p***ing me off are “curating” and “sourcing”.

‘When did “buy new clothes” become “curate fresh wardrobe”? I do not curate. I am not a curator. I need clothes. I buy clothes. I wear clothes. End of.’

As for the word ‘sourcing’, this sleepwould deprived shift-worker remarked: ‘ Has anyone ever said “I am going to Tesco to source our ingredients”. Have they f***!’

(A brief digression: I would include among my own pet hates the author’s stand-alone sentence: ‘ End of,’ which offends me quite as much as his or her profanities. But then there’s no accounting for taste, and I’m quite sure that the briefest trawl through my own writings over the past half century or so would yield countless examples of words and phrases that set some people’s teeth on edge. In my time, I may even have written ‘End of’, though I very much hope not.)

Anyway, followers of Mumsnet were soon piling in with their own bugbears, of which here’s a sample: ‘I hate that everything is journey . . . My weight loss journey, my pregnancy journey . . . ’; ‘Why does coffee have to be grabbed?’; ‘“Gifting” drives me wild. Gift is a noun. To give is the verb.’

I say amen to all of these, and to lots more that have appeared on the website. In particular, I was delighted to see that a great many people share my dislike of the Americanism ‘ reach out’, which is now widely used as an alternative to the less emotional, more British words ‘contact’ or ‘get in touch’.

Ballistic

In my trade, I receive scores of emails from PR companies every day, of which increasing numbers begin with the words: ‘Hi, Tom, I hope you’re having a great weekend! I’m excited to reach out to you with news about an incredible new range of . . . ’ There was a time when I used to read them all diligently. But now that I’m old and grumpy, I press ‘delete’ as soon as I see the words ‘reach out’. So I never get to discover whether the incredible new range in question is of mascara, scatter- cushions, vegan sandwiches or intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Now Susie Dent, the serenely authoritative lexicographer who presides over Dictionary Corner on Countdown, has stirred up another hornets’ nest of irritants, after appealing to her 1.1 million followers on Twitter to name the hated words and expressions they like to see expunged from the English language.

Publishing her findings this week, she revealed that the most unpopular expression among her fans was ‘going forward’ — the phrase so often used by bureaucrats, bank managers and ministers to mean ‘in the future’.

A surprise entry at number two (surprising to me, I mean, because it has never particularly grated on me) was ‘No disrespect, but . . . ’ This was followed by the word ‘like’, used as a filler (‘He’s, like, so hot I could shack up with him, like, tomorrow.’)

‘I wanted to reach out’ crops up again, at number four, while others in the top ten named by Miss Dent’s followers included ‘I’m not gonna lie’, the ‘optics’ of something (meaning the appearance or the impression), ‘basically’ and ‘my bad’. Oh, and people who begin their answers to every question with the word ‘So’ came in for a pasting too (‘What’s your job?’ ‘So, I’m a community outreach officer for Haringey Council.’)

As for my own list, I could add so many to the above that they would fill a fat volume. I’ll just say here that among them would be: ‘can I get?’ (meaning ‘may I have?’); ‘literally’ (used to mean its opposite, ‘metaphorically’); and that other staple of politicians ‘let me be absolutely clear’, which invariably precedes a statement that’s anything but.

Grumpy

Pronunciations can infuriate me too. Why does almost everyone these days pronounce words such as ‘research’, ‘resource’ and ‘ice cream’ in the American way, with the stress on the first syllable (REE-search, REE-source, ICE-cream) instead of the old British way, with the stress on the second?

Meanwhile, is it hopelessly old-fashioned and pedantic of me to insist that words such as media and data are plural, and therefore demand plural verbs when they’re the subject of a sentence? I fear so, since even in the most respectable newspapers these days you will see constructions such as ‘the data shows . . . ’, where my instinct would be to write ‘the data show . . . ’

I know, I know. There are many reading this who will tell me to ‘get a life’ (another candidate for my banned list).

Others will point out that living languages evolve all the time, while the meanings and pronunciations of words change as the years roll by.

Yes, data and media may have started life as neuter plurals of the Latin words datum and medium. But perhaps we should accept that when enough people start treating them as singular, then singular they will become.

I have a sneaking feeling, however, that there’s a grumpy old man in most of us — of all ages and both sexes.

Together, surely, we should rise up in revolt against vandals of English who reach out to tell us, like, that they’re not gonna lie, we’re all doomed, going forward. End of.