Check yourself: have you succumbed to this corporate speak epidemic?

You know how it goes with corporate speak. A strange new habit grows and spreads, creeping largely unnoticed into the language, until one day you hear a sentence so bizarre, so divorced from normality, that it brings you up short. It happened to me the other day. A call centre operative, in the middle of a prolonged display of not being able to help, had to check something with a colleague. Before doing so she said: ‘Would it be OK if I put yourself on hold?’

Just stop and consider that sentence for a moment. ‘Would it be OK if I put yourself on hold?’ The woman who uttered it was once, I’m sure, a normal little girl, learning to speak. She would have got things wrong in the endearing way all toddlers do: ‘goed’ instead of ‘went’, ‘embeloke’ instead of ‘envelope’ and so on. But I bet she never once, in the furthest extremities of surreality that such mistakes can explore, uttered a sentence as absurd as ‘Would it be OK if I put yourself on hold?’