Johnson

JOHN MCWHORTER makes one of the few non-partisan and fresh arguments about modern American political speech that I've seen relating to the shootings in Tuscon. The internet, YouTube and all, has been a culmination of the processes begun in the 1960s, where political speech began to unravel from formal, tightly-wrapped, writerly prose of a kind the ancient Greeks would recognise into casual, emotional "just talking". From here it's but a short step to "reload" and "I want my country back!" Mr McWhorter made this argument about the decline of formal speech in his 2003 book "Doing Our Own Thing", and updates it here for the YouTube age.

It's pretty compelling as far as it goes, but I've been struck again and again by Americans' unwillingness to get comparative at times like this. Other democracies underwent the 1960s, and now have the internet and YouTube. Their speech has also become less formal—I noted a week ago the decline in Danish formal pronoun usage, and the rise in first-name address, even between the prime minister and leader of the opposition in a formal debate. But I must also say of that debate that it was civilised and decent in the extreme. Not perfect, by any means: I found the prime minister a little peevish, and his opponent slightly hectoring. But one thing I never saw was the attempt to get in those one-liners that American debates have become famous for: "There you go again," "Change you can Xerox," "You're no Jack Kennedy".

Perhaps I can cajole Mr McWhorter into elaborating whether and why America in particular replaced rhetoric (a noble word, much changed in meaning over the last 40 years) with sloganeering, particularly sloganeering of the "reload" type.

DID that headline make you uncomfortable? Of course it did, and you're not alone. As Publisher's Weekly reports, NewSouth Books is releasing a new edition of Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (yes, the first title apparently does lack the definite article) with the words "nigger" and "injun" removed.

"Political correctness!" you cry. Not so fast. The editor, Alan Gribben, a Twain scholar at Auburn University in Montgomery, Alabama, explained that when he took part in Big Read Alabama, a state-wide reading programme that had chosen "Tom Sawyer" as its text for 2009,

I was sought out by local teachers, and to a person they said we would love to teach this novel, and 'Huckleberry Finn', but we feel we can't do it anymore. In the new classroom, it's really not acceptable.

He elaborates, in his introduction to the new edition, that "numerous communities currently ban 'Huckleberry Finn' as required reading in public schools owing to its offensive racial language", and that in his long experience, people prefer it without the racial slurs:

For nearly forty years I have led college classes, bookstore forums, and library reading groups in detailed discussions of 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn' in California, Texas, New York, and Alabama, and I always recoiled from uttering the racial slurs spoken by numerous characters, including Tom and Huck. I invariably substituted the word “slave” for Twain’s ubiquitous n-word whenever I read any passages aloud. Students and audience members seemed to prefer this expedient, and I could detect a visible sense of relief each time, as though a nagging problem with the text had been addressed.

On the one hand, I'm inclined to defend Mr Gribben. His motives are clearly noble. He wants to make classics of American literature more widely read, and is willing to pay the price of a little sanitisation. Even with the words "nigger" and "injun" gone from the books, you'd have to be an idiot to read them and not notice how widespread and evil slavery and racial prejudice were; so if cleaning up Twain makes more young people read him and learn about life back then, that is surely to the good. Finally, as he points out, this new edition hardly wipes the unexpurgated Twain off the literary map:

...literally dozens of other editions are available for those readers who prefer Twain’s original phrasing. Those standard editions will always exist... This NewSouth Edition of 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn' is emphatically not intended for academic scholars.

On the other hand, I agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates Jamelle Bouie on Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog that

erasing "nigger" from 'Huckleberry Finn'—or ignoring our failures—doesn't change anything. It doesn't provide racial enlightenment, or justice, and it won't shield anyone from the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination. All it does is feed the American aversion to history and reflection.

A sanitised Twain may teach young readers a lot, but it hides from them a crucial insight: that a word they know to be unacceptable now was once utterly commonplace. You can't fully appreciate why "nigger" is taboo today if you don't know how it was used back then, and you can't fully appreciate what it was like to be a slave if you don't know how slaves were addressed. The "visible sense of relief" Mr Gribben reports in his listeners is not, in fact, desirable; feeling discomfort when you read the book today is part of the point of reading it. (Of course, even today, if you're black, you may well use "nigger" in the company of other blacks. But even to understand why that use is okay while its use by a white person isn't, you have to be aware of the word's historical role.)

Furthermore, eliminating "nigger" and "injun" elides how closely language is tied to social norms. The everyday words we use aren't chosen by chance or dictated by a dictionary; they reflect our relationships with one another. This is a basic lesson in how human society works. Given how little young Americans read, one who reads the original Twain is unlikely to read much else that teaches it so clearly.

I might still side with Mr Gribben, however, were it not for one thing. He goes so far to avoid these words that he circumvents them even in his introduction. He writes that Twain

was endeavoring to accurately depict the prevailing social attitudes along the Mississippi River Valley during the 1840s by repeatedly employing in both novels a linguistic corruption of “Negro” in reference to African American slaves, and by tagging the villain in 'Tom Sawyer' with a deprecating racial label for Native Americans... in Chapter 1, the boys refer to slaves four times with the pejorative n-word.

The sheer hammering repetition of "nigger"—219 times in Huckleberry Finn—may justify cutting it out of the text. But refusing even to mention it when you're explaining why you've cut it out smacks of just what Mr Coates Bouie alleges: an "aversion to history and reflection". The very fact that the text has had a word excised is itself an important lesson in the history and politics of language, but it's a lesson lost on young people if you can't even bring yourself to tell them, unambiguously, what that word is.

Update: There's a good discussion at the New York Times' "Room for Debate", with a preponderance in favour of keeping Twain as is. I best like Gish Jen's comment: "It is, of course, perfectly fine to change the texts of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, so long as the cover reads, by Mark Twain* with a footnote: *as bowdlerized by Alan Gribben."

NEW YEAR’s is over, so German-speakers are through wishing each other guten Rutsch. “Have a good slide” has a certain surface plausibility to a non-German: you glide into the next year, hoping perhaps that the momentum will carry you through until the following December. (Offered on Berlin’s icy pavements, the greeting can sound vaguely unfriendly.) No one is sure where it comes from. Wikipedia offers two possibilities.

Rutsch was a jovial 19th-century way of saying “trip” or “journey”, inspired perhaps by sleds and then by the advent of rail. The Grimm Brothers’ dictionary quotes Goethe: “sonntag rutscht man auf das Land,” or “on Sunday we go to the countryside.” The shift from space to time may have happened at the beginning of the 20th century, when "guten Rutsch" shows up as a greeting on newly popular picture postcards.

More intriguing is the possibility that it was imported from Hebrew via Yiddish by way of “Rotwelsch”, the argot of marginal groups like pedlars, beggars and prostitutes. On this theory, guten Rutsch was begotten by Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year (literally “head of the year”). “Rosh” meant “head” in Rotwelsch-speaking circles in the middle of the 18th century. Yiddish parentage is the more popular explanation but, sadly, it sounds the less likely. For one thing, Rosh Hashanah falls in September or October, not at the end of the Gregorian year. Jews referred to the Christian version simply as shanah khadashah, “new year” in Hebrew. For another, many Yiddish-speakers say something closer to “rausch” or "roish" than “rosh” and it’s a stretch from any of those to “Rutsch”. Which is a pity. Yiddish is basically German leavened with Hebrew, Aramaic and Slavic ingredients. It would be nice to think that more traffic also flowed the other way. German has borrowed chutzpah and other bits from Yiddish, but probably not the cheerful guten Rutsch.

EVERYONE knows the number of Spanish-speakers in the United States is increasing—but where in the United States? Last month the Census Bureau released data from its latest American Community Survey showing the percentage of people aged five and over who speak Spanish at home. This survey took place over five years from 2005 to 2009, so it's not a snapshot, but with that caveat in mind, it does show small but notable differences from the 2000 census, both in the overall percentage of Spanish speakers (up to 12.1% from 10.7% in 2000) and in where they are concentrated: increasingly in the north and centre of the country.

The maps below show those differences, but to see them it's actually easier to click on the maps, open them full-size in separate browser tabs and flip between them. What you'll notice is:

• smaller concentrations of Spanish-speakers in parts of the southern states that used to be in Mexico: New Mexico, Arizona, south-west Texas and southern Colorado
• a distinct increase in the north-west: northern California, Oregon, Washington and western Idaho
• patches of increase all across the central states, and more noticeably, in Florida, Georgia and the eastern seaboard
• most impervious to change are the far north—Montana and the Dakotas—and deep south: Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama

I'm not sure what this all adds up to, but I'm sure some of our readers know the answer. One interpretation I can think of is that second- and third- (or even later) generation Hispanics in old Mexico are becoming more prosperous and moving northwards, while keeping their Spanish in the family. Another is that those in the south are anglicising, while new immigrants are seeking opportunities further afield from the border. It may also be that undocumented Hispanics in the north are less wary of census-takers than they used to be. These explanations aren't all mutually exclusive, of course. What's interesting is that either way, the deep south remains a redoubt of whiteness non-Hispanics.

SKIERS and snowboarders do not seem to like each other much. Babbage, our sister blog, has tried to weigh in on the perennial question of one tribe's superiority over the other from a scientific angle. (If reader comments are anything to go by, the predominantly ski-oriented audience remains unconvinced by this correspondent's pro-snowboard stance.) As with any feud, though, we may also consider its linguistic dimension.

In Poland, where these words are being written, the two factions' mutual disparagement is reflected in the way members of each speak of the other's kit. And so skiers will call a snowboard a parapet. This has little to do with the English word spelled the same way and translates into "windowsill". Mind you, in Poland windowsills tend actually to resemble snowboards in being flat wooden panels at least 30 cm (one foot) wide. Skis, meanwhile, are known as boazeria (from French boiserie), or "wainscots", ie, a narrower sort of wooden slat used to cover walls.

The precise origin of these monikers is unclear. Nor is it evident which came first, provoking the other side to come up with its own interior-design-inspired riposte. Moreover, like in many a family squabble, what began as disparaging labels appear to have become terms of endearment. Many skiers and snowboarders now affectionately refer to their own equipment in the way once deemed derisive.

Readers are invited to chip in epithets for alpine gear found in other languages. They are also encouraged to hit the slopes—on their chosen type of wooden furnishing.

BRIAN COWEN, Ireland's prime minister (or to use the Irish, An Taoiseach) has been struggling in recent weeks to save the Irish economy and Fianna Fail, his political party, not to mention his own career—one poll showed nine out of ten want him gone. But he is hopeful that the Irish language has a future. On the same day he participated in a rare meeting with the Council of State, which has met just over a dozen times since 1937, to consider banking legislation, he unveiled a plan to triple the number of daily Irish speakers in 20 years.

Although, Irish is the first official language according to the Irish Constitution, less than half, 42%, of the 4.2m living in Ireland can speak some Irish, and only 3% use Irish as their household language. Until recently, UNESCO's "Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger" classified Irish as "definitely endangered". This status has since been improved to "vulnerable", though fears persist that the language could die without help, even in the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking regions.

This vulnerability prompted a ten-year study on how to strengthen the language, the results of which were unveiled on December 21st. For the first time, Ireland has a "comprehensive long-term plan for the Irish language", said Mr Cowen. The 13 objectives are ambitious. As well as tripling the number of daily speakers of Irish, the plan hopes to increase the number of people with some knowledge of Irish from the 1.66m to 2m over 20 years. It also hopes to increase the number of speakers in the Gaeltacht by 25%.

To achieve these goals, the strategy determined that "normalisation" of the language is required. Already this sounds better than being force-fed Irish poetry in school for state tests, as was the practice for generations. The "normalisation" begins at home. Early intervention measures include encouraging and supporting parents to raise children bilingually. The Gaeltacht is to be promoted as a holiday destination. The new strategy calls for increasing the number of Gaelscoileanna (Irish schools), and encouraging adults as well as children to attend them. Gaeltacht communities will have to come up with a language plan within two years to keep their "Gaeltacht" status, and Irish language grants from the government. New communities could become part of the Gaeltacht if they meet linguistic criteria. Other measures include keeping Irish as an obligatory subject up to Leaving Certificate level.

Some worry that the plan may be overambitious. Certainly, it seems that the €1.5m set aside for year one of the plan does not seem enough to implement all the plan's measures, but Mr Cowen pointed out that even €1 billion would not be enough to ensure that everyone in Ireland spoke Irish. The strategy does have cross-party support, which is encouraging, especially with a looming general election, which could force Fianna Fail out of government.

The Irish have a funny relationship with their native language, a mixture of pride and resentment. Many raise their eyes at the "wasted" money spent in printing government documents in English and in Irish. But most also don't want to see Ireland become Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam (A country without a language, a country without a soul)—or as my own mother sometimes says of my own Irish ability, "is fearr Gaeilge bhriste ná Béarla cliste" (Broken Irish is better than clever English).

Among the words we (almost) never use in The Economist are our correspondents’ names. I say “almost” because the special reports are signed, as is each editor’s valedictory article (here is the one by our previous editor, Bill Emmott). But other articles have no bylines. Here is the explanation of the policy, lifted from the “about” page of our website:

Many hands write The Economist, but it speaks with a collective voice. Leaders are discussed, often disputed, each week in meetings that are open to all members of the editorial staff. Journalists often co-operate on articles. And some articles are heavily edited. The main reason for anonymity, however, is a belief that what is written is more important than who writes it. As Geoffrey Crowther, editor from 1938 to 1956, put it, anonymity keeps the editor “not the master but the servant of something far greater than himself. You can call that ancestor-worship if you wish, but it gives to the paper an astonishing momentum of thought and principle.”

From my own experience, the biggest practical consequence of anonymity is to invest our correspondents with an odd sort of glamour. More than once, people to whom I have introduced myself at conferences and the like have questioned me closely on my career and qualifications, saying that they are curious to know “what sort” of people write for The Economist. It reminds me of the Ankh-Morpork Times in Terry Pratchett’s book, "The Truth", in which the articles are also unsigned. Over breakfast, one of the editor’s fellow lodgers speculates as to the identity of the authors. “Oh, they’d be special people for doing this,” replies another. Really, he asks. “Oh, yes,” comes the reply. “They wouldn’t allow just anyone to write what they like. That stands to reason.”

Surprisingly often, people seem to think that because our articles are unsigned, we in some sense operate undercover. (One blogger, Kevin Drum, went so far as to try to "out" as many of the writers who blog, since initials are given here, as he could.) In the course of musing on Brazilian politicians’ nicknames in a previous post, I had reason to mention my own surname (Joyce). “OMG,” commented one reader. “I thought Economist correspondents were supposed never to reveal their names!” I’ve just spent a few happy minutes imagining what my work life would be like if that were the case: my business card with a blank where the name should be... turning up to interviews in a Mission-Impossible-style latex mask... responding to receptionists’ requests to know who’s calling with a laconic, “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you...”

The truth is, of course, more prosaic. Even though you can’t tell for sure who wrote which article, you can look us up in our media directory, and if we write for our sister publication, Intelligent Life, or chair one of our conferences or moderate one of our debates, our names are given. But the enduring fascination with our policy of anonymity is a reminder that sometimes the most powerful words are the ones that aren’t said.

GULLIVER got to the video advertising Word Lens before I could. Andrew Sullivan marvels that it's "not science fiction". Indeed it looks pretty amazing, though being a Droid man myself I, like Gulliver, am as yet unable to test drive it.

I will say, in the spirit of Christmas grinchiness, that the freeze-frame translation contains several mistakes. The English reads "And it goes the other direction." This is translated word-for-word as "Y lo va el otro dirección". But the "lo" is a Spanish object pronoun (for "it") that shoulnd't be there in subject position, and you wouldn't just say "la otra direccion", but "en la otra dirección" in Spanish. And "direccion" is feminine, so it isn't "el otro".  In other words, it should just read "Y va en la otra dirección".  And this is a simple sentence, in one of the most common pairings (Spanish-English) for translation software.

It's both frustrating and heartening just how slowly computer translation has improved. Frustrating because I, like anyone else, would love to paste the text of a foreign newspaper article into Google Translate and know I could rely on the correctness (and readability) result. Heartening, in that it's good to know not all human abilities can easily be replaced by computers. 

THIS morning's electronic postbag brings the memo from Carol Bartz, the CEO of Yahoo!, to her employees about an impending round of layoffs:

I want to share some tough news with you. Today, we began notifying some Yahoos that they will lose their jobs. Most of the reductions will come from the Products org and, when completed, will affect about 4% of the company.

[...] This was a tough call, but a necessary one. We need to make these changes now to ensure that Products is structured and running the way we want as 2011 begins. And that means we need fewer Yahoos in some areas, and different types of Yahoos in others.

It's not uncommon for there to be an official or unofficial name for a company's employees (Googlers, Microsofties). Perhaps within Yahoo!, everyone is used to this nomenclature. But when I read the memo I can't help thinking of Jonathan Swift. As the OED puts it:

"Degraded and bestial". An appropriate description, perhaps, of how it feels to be canned just before Christmas.

THE Wall Street Journal, in reporting that American consumers are spending again, quotes Chris Christopher, an economist at IHS Global Insight:

I wouldn't break out the Champagne, but things are looking better.

At first I thought perhaps they pay economists at IHS Global Insight more than they pay reporter-bloggers at The Economist. (The stuff we break out upon hearing good news in the G. household is likely to be a modest cava.)  But it's not clear that Champagne here is intended to mean the nice stuff from Champagne. Journal usage seems to be all over the map: it's capital here and here, despite the references not obviously being to wine from Champagne.  But this article, about the  region and its wines specifically, calls the stuff "champagne". I think it's fair to say that the Journal hasn't decided on a rule. The Economist has no style-book ruling, but we seem to use lower-case in practice, following a general preference for lower-case.

The Champagne people have, of course, something to do with the controversy, with a long-running "Champagne comes from Champagne" ad campaign. Fair enough. It's usually a compliment when your product is successful enough that it loses its initial capital. To hoover, photoshop and google can all be found uncapped, as can parmesan, cheddar, colby and swiss cheeses, all originally toponymic. Companies typically push back. (Adobe wants you to say "to edit with Photoshop CS™ editing software" or some such tosh.)  Regions didn't do so as much until fairly recently, but now, as a dizzyingly detailed Wikipedia article will tell you, Parma ham, Roquefort cheese and even Melton Mowbray pork pies can only be sold as such if they come from those places, which will hope that you capitalise them.

The anti-authoritarian streak in me doesn't like being told what to do by the self-important, even if the inner Economist, er, economist appreciates brand equity. And the linguist says that it doesn't matter what the Champagne folks do or even what the style books of prestigious publications say. The long-term trend in words that become high-frequency and generic is to go lower-case, and there's not much that will stop it.

ENGLISH needs a proper adjective to cover the United States of America and its citizens. “American” is formally ambiguous, even if the context generally makes it clear. It is already awkward when you want to talk about the American representative at the Organisation of American States, but if, say, Unasur, the Latin American block, ever gets itself in gear, the phrase “the American response to the crisis” might get more problematic.

Using "United States" as an adjective, or even US (banned at The Economist, lest too many capital letters "spatter the paper"), brings its own problems: is the apostrophe needed in “the United States’ ambassador”? There’s none in the formal name of the United States Mint, for example. The “Yankee ambassador” would side-step the problem neatly, but—leaving aside the fact that only outside America does "Yankee" mean all Americans—does the world's most powerful country really want its representative to be a Connecticut Yankee (or any other kind) at Queen Elizabeth's court?

Other languages have the same problem, and their responses differ. Spanish uses americano for all inhabitants of the Americas, though in practice, so little unites them that there is hardly ever cause to use the word. It also has in its armoury norteamericano, which commonly refers to citizens of the United States even though it technically means Mexicans and Canadians too; estadounidense, a latinate adjective from Estados Unidos, which is at least precise, but is rarely heard outside formal speech (well, try saying it); and of course yanqui and gringo, terms not conducive to good diplomacy. Portuguese, too, has estadunidense.

One might posit that only because these languages are spoken in Latin America do they have the need to differentiate one type of American from another. Yet the French language's links to the Americas, in the form of Quebec, don’t seem to have had the same effect. Etatsunien or états-unien does not even show up in the dictionary of the Académie Française, while Wikipedia in French acknowledges the word's existence but says it would be like using "Usonian" or "United-Statesian" in English; the French style is to say américain. The Germans don’t mess around and will call you US-amerikanisch (so good they named it twice) if they need to be clear—though they spoil this by being just as likely as everyone else to overlook the Mexicans when they say nordamerikanisch. Chinese, on the other hand, can address the problem head-on by appending the specific ideograms for country or continent to the same phonetic root (美国 meiguo, for the country, 美洲 meizhou for the continents).

In despair one might turn to poetry. But even here no help is to be found: Columbia as a personification of the United States is just too like Colombia. All that effort to end up with “the Columbians beat the Colombians 2-0”? No.

If you accept that the need to differentiate is growing as new world powers emerge, you accept that sooner or later our fecund language will see something coined or an old favourite leap to the fore. In fact, according to the Urban Dictionary, it has already happened:

Similar to United Statians, USAnian is a term used mostly by expats to denote North Amerians [sic] who are not Canadians.

Any better ideas?

MY only excuse for failing to produce any Johnsonia during R.L.G.'s absence last week is that I've been very busy on a new business venture here at The Economist—of which I can say little, except that it involves one hecka lot of meetings. And so I've been more exposed than usual to business English and its peculiar phrases. These could be explained simply as cultural markers of the business tribe, but I suspect each one contains its own subtle cues and subtext; herewith my attempts to speculate on their origins and meaning.

Reach out

Usage: R.L.G. griped about this one a while back, but it's not just PR people who use it. Among the people I work with, at least, "I'll reach out to Joe" seems to have almost entirely replaced "I'll contact Joe" and "I'll talk to Joe".

Source: I don't know—an inversion of what used to be called public relations, propaganda or proselytism and is now called "outreach", perhaps? Or else an inexplicable Motown reference?

Subtext: The phrase implies an added effort, a stretch beyond the normal, and the subtext usually seems to be either "I'll do Joe the grudging favour of asking his opinion even though he wouldn't normally get half a look into what we're doing", or "I'll take the risk of asking Joe for his advice even though he's probably far too busy and probably sees our project as a threat to his entire existence". A little less cynically, one might argue that "reach out" should in fact be considered a distinct phrasal verb meaning "to talk to someone outside one's normal circle of contacts".

As an aside, though, I will note that another of the phrases "reach out" seems to be displacing in business-speak is "get in touch with", which seems normal to us now but was probably decried as a barbarity in its day. (Its original meaning, says the OED, is the one that signifies being aware or informed, eg, "to be in touch with public opinion").

Touch base

Usage: "Let's touch base tomorrow" means "let's talk tomorrow". Unlike "contact" and "talk to", though "touch base" doesn't seem to have been eclipsed by "reach out".

Source: Baseball, I presume, which may explain its resilience in a country that loves sporting metaphors. Yet if so the metaphor is strangely inept, given that in the sport, "touching base" is a solitary, win-lose action: the runner and the fielder vie to touch base first. In this case, by contrast, touching base means collaborating.

Subtext: The word "touch" lends an air of lightness and brevity: "touching base" implies a quick conversation, a reassurance that you won't take up too much of someone's time, whereas "reaching out" doesn't. It also implies informality. I would venture that the dictionary definition of "to touch base" should be "to hold a meeting that does not require any of the parties to check calendar availability on their BlackBerrys".

To your point

Usage: It's terribly important, at least in American business meetings, to be constantly acknowledging the contributions other people have made, so that everybody feels included. But instead of "as you said" or "as Jane mentioned", it's "to your point" or "to Jane's point".

Source: No real mystery here: it's the common phrase "make a point". But I think this is a clue to the real meaning, which is...

Subtext: Since it's possible—oh, so possible—to say a lot at a meeting without making any points at all, saying "to Jane's point" is, in the continuing spirit of positivity and good team relations, a way to bestow even greater recognition upon Jane's contribution. After all, if something is worthless, we say it "has no point", and business documents are all in bullet points. So I will posit that a "point" is now actually a discrete unit of measurement (soon to be adopted under the Système International) for useful contributions. Kilopoints, megapoints, nanopoints et alia all to follow, just as soon as someone has invented the measuring tools.

Going forward

Usage: A favourite disfavourite of mine, this notionally means "from now on", but often just signifies "now" and is just as often totally redundant:

I am pleased to announced that I have nominated Kiyasha Gonzalez-Guggenheim to be our new head of meatball packaging going forward.

or

Kiyasha's contribution will be particularly valuable in ensuring that all our customers have a consistent and satisfying meatball presentation experience going forward.

Source: Not a clue.

Real meaning: Again, as with "to your point", this is all about having the right attitude. In business it is good to look to the future; one of the most damning subtle indictments you can make of ideas or people is that they are "not forward-looking". Reminding everyone that we are, indeed, going forward and not moving backward is essential in boosting morale. This is especially true after cataclysmic setbacks:

“Our charge going forward is to have realistic, clear goals and to execute them expeditiously.” (New Orleans deputy mayor Cedric Grant, after Hurricane Katrina).

(And by the way—I look forward to "execute expeditiously" becoming widespread enough, going forward, to include on a future version of this list.)

I do note in passing that last year some people set up an entire website devoted to purging their organisation of the phrase "going forward", and reported some success. But in the wider world it seems very much alive.

Deep(er) dive

Usage: To take a close or closer look: "I'll do a deeper dive on those figures on Monday."

Source: Umm... diving.

Subtext: There's something athletic, soulful even, about the thought of physically diving into a spreadsheet, kicking around in its dusky deep columns, paddling lazily through the surf of numbers, digging for hidden gems among its pivot tables, and coming up for air gasping but ecstatic, with the decimal points cascading down your forehead. It could be a subtle signal to colleagues of the effort you are about to make as you hold your breath and plunge into the numbers. Or maybe it's nothing more than an attempt to romanticise to yourself what is otherwise a soul-deadening activity.

If you enjoyed these, please suggest some other examples of corporate-speak for cultural analysis.