Let's all sing from the same list of words

Robust. That’s the word of the month.  Ask anyone in government about the UK’s summer riots, and the response will include the word ‘robust’.

Doesn’t matter who you ask. Robust policing. Robust legislation. Robust sentencing. A robust approach. A robust response.

Alright, alright. Enough with the robustness. We get it. You plan on not pussyfooting around.

But it’s not credible. This month’s buzzword turns fast into this month’s cliché. And clichés simply skate lightly and unrecognised across a listener’s awareness. They become a devalued currency.

What happened? Did someone in Downing Street send a text to everyone, telling them the key word was 'robust'?  Fine, if they also allowed the speakers to choose their own form of words to mean the same thing (as if they were people with independent minds).

May be the speakers simply wanted to sound like The Leader – ‘I’m on the same page as David, y’know’.  Maybe they were afraid of not sounding like The Leader – ‘if I say something different, it may backfire on me. If I say what Downing Street says, at least I won’t be blamed on my own’.

Or maybe they just thought robust was a bloody good word, and couldn’t come up with anything better.

Any of these possibilities is worrisome. Of course the management team should sound like it’s together on an issue. But parrot-speak is pointless.

When a director ‘gives’ an actor his lines, he’s doing the acting for him. The result is simply bad, unconvincing acting. Let the actor find a way to deliver the meaning, and suddenly, the performance goes from ham to convincing. Same when some turkey in corporate communications tells the management team what to say. Two spokesmen later, the strategy is glaring.

When a spokesman decides to copy his guv’nor, he simply sounds like a mindless puppet (OK, so all puppets are mindless, but we’re trying to make a point here). Nobody really believes he means what he says.

When people are well-briefed, in a constant and fundamental way, they’ll know the right thing to say without waiting for an SMS script. There’s a chance people will begin to believe them.

If they don’t instinctively know what to say, without being given their lines, maybe they shouldn’t be in that role. And if you don’t trust them to say the right thing on their own, maybe you shouldn’t be managing them.

And besides, most of the time they don’t mean robust. Robust defences, robust legislation, maybe. Robust policing? Robust sentencing? No. If they really want to stick to the theme there, the word they should use is robustious.

Bet they don’t.

This is no time to be coy

Good sailing shoes are waterproof. Which usually means, they don’t ventilate well. Smelly shoes are often a notable facet of life aboard small boats.

My own shoes got a degree too lived-in on a recent passage from Liverpool to Southampton. The rest of the crew were pretty kind about it. But I know that’s what they were doing, so I resolved to prevent the problem happening again.

I bought a bottle of shoe deodorant.  This is what it says on the label:

Clarks Odour Killer Spray with its unique odour-eliminating formula disrupts the metabolic process of unwanted odour-causing micro-organisms and thus interrupts their ability to function, grow and reproduce.

Run that by me again? Ignore the 27-word, one-sentence length of the paragraph. Even the first and only comma, three words from end, has a begrudging feel about it..

But my point is this: what we read isn’t selling copy. It’s a lazy parroting of the manufacturers’ brief to the packaging designers. It’s a rambling explanation of how the stuff works. It doesn’t make me feel any better for buying it.

Surely, if we disrupt the metabolic process of anything to the point where it can’t function, grow and reproduce (which is a bit like saying ‘Hello, good evening and welcome’), we pretty much kill the beggar. That, I’m sure, is how your average smelly-trainer-wearing jock would prefer to articulate it. And why do we specify that it works on unwanted odour-causing micro-organisms? Aren’t they all unwanted? Does it spare the wanted ones?

What’s wrong with telling it like it is? Odour Killer Spray kills the bugs that make shoes smelly. One squirt, and your shoes are fresh again!

I know what’s wrong with it. It means hiring a writer. But nowadays, the ability to touch-text is more highly regarded than the ability to spell, or parse a sentence. No need to pay someone to do what I can do myself, they say.

The label also features two simple drawings. One of a hand, squirting the stuff from the bottle into a shoe. In case you don’t know how to squirt deodorant into a shoe. And a picture of a shoe drying. Little lines throb and radiate from the entire shoe. Those little lines make it look just like the stinky shoe it was in the first place …

I guess they didn’t want to hire an art director, either.