Words guaranteed to make your heart sink

There are certain words that I hate. Of course, if you really want to unpick it, it’s not so much the words themselves, per se. As it is there are few if any words that I hate for themselves, although quite a few I’m very fond of. The name of the capital city of Burkina Faso, for example, Ouagadougou, is in and of itself an utter delight. So really and truly it’s what the word represents that I hate. Such a word is workshop.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. The portmanteau word workshop is of itself perfectly inoffensive. As is the proper meaning – a space in which work is carried out. When used in this way to mean a place where things (preferably material) are made or repaired  is in fact a pretty pleasing concept. My hatred for the word really began concurrently with my teaching career. I’ve written before about INSET (in service training). For the vast majority of my first 30 years as a teacher, my heart used to sink at the prospect of INSET generally, but it would then sink several floors further if the words ‘workshop session’ were mentioned.

“We will be having a workshop session.” Translation, we will be expecting you to listen to someone who probably has no experience inside any classroom and certainly has no experience of the particular situation in YOUR classroom lecture you for at least 60 minutes, then you will be instructed to perform some totally random exercises which have very little real connection with the subject of the INSET and absolutely NO practical relevance to what goes on in your classroom. Hey, I was an English specialist and I just objected to the hijacking of a perfectly innocent word. Because despite what the authorities might have thought, just calling some pile of crud a workshop did not automatically transform it into an experience where something useful was produced or made better. We genuinely had a saying in the school I taught in for my first 29 years – never trust anything that calls itself a workshop. To be fair, by the time that the school closed, even the senior management had stopped using the term.

Why do I mention this? Well, in my current position as an NHS patient coordinator with the Dental Access Portal, from time to time I get sent generic emails inviting me to take part in inappropriate and irrelevant training. The one I received today used the offending w word. Thankfully it’s totally irrelevant to me now.

It’s difficult to think of other innocent words which so arouse my hackles. On a personal level I suppose there’s ‘organise’. A perfectly innocent word, I grant you. But in her personal idiolect, Mrs. Londinius uses it as a synonym for ‘do’. So she will say ‘Will you organise the washing up?’ when all she means is ‘Get off your bum and fill the dishwasher’. She has many, many excellent qualities, I should hasten to add, but this one little linguistic idiosyncracy is a persistent niggle.