As a new member of staff at Vanity Fair in 1995, I was given a list of words it was unacceptable to use in the magazine. A few of these reflected the personal idiosyncrasies of the editor — ‘golfer’, for instance — but most were slang terms like ‘flick’, ‘honcho’ and ‘hooker’. The message was clear: you’re in the drawing room now and you should leave the language of the saloon bar behind. Snobbery is always a hallmark of such lists, the supreme example being Alan Ross’s famous essay in Encounter distinguishing between U and Non-U words. However, sometimes this snobbery is hidden beneath the surface and those who draw up such lists — as well as those who pay attention to them — are not aware of it. A case in point is a collection of prohibited words published recently on a trendy website called Listable. It includes ‘funnest’, ‘grok’, ‘staycation’, ‘natch’ and ‘artisanal’. What irritates the compilers of this list, I suspect, is that these words have begun to enter the mainstream; they are no longer the exclusive preserve of the cognoscenti. To use a phrase that these same people would object to, they have ‘jumped the shark’.
As an experiment, I conducted a straw poll on Twitter in which I asked people to send me the words and phrases that irritated them most. Almost without exception, they singled out language used by people lower down the status ladder than themselves. For instance, many of them flagged up the management gobbledegook that has become deeply unfashionable since David Brent started using it in The Office. Examples include ‘blue sky thinking’, ‘outside the box’, ‘24/7’, ‘guestimate’ and ‘110 per cent’. No doubt there are several good reasons why people object to this jargon, but I am sure the main one is that the corporate drones who use it are ‘in trade’, to use a 19th-century expression.
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