The other day, driving around town with the radio on, I heard a DJ repeatedly using the word "effort" as a verb. "He's efforting to get a job there," said the DJ, and followed up a few moments later with, "Well, I've been efforting to -" This was the point where my efforts to change the station bore fruit as, furiousing mutterly to myself, I vocabularied the tuner clean into next week. What is
with people?
Granted, you can't expect much from radio DJ's - who are really just salespeople to begin with, and whose only useful function is performed by computer program anyway. (Until recently I would have added, "Except of course for KUT.")
What I don't understand is why, particularly in a language as highly nuanced and rich in vocabulary as English is, these people feel the need to create new terms for concepts which were already so amply represented. Then again, I'm still haunted by the memory of the motivational speaker who claimed that "try" was the most subversive word in the English language, that we should expunge it altogether from our daily speech, and that (as you may recall - though apparently the marketing types at Avis never caught on) when Avis adopted the motto "We try harder," their sales immediately plummeted by some ridiculously implausible percentage.
Or they came out of a slump and finally started to show a profit. Whatever.
Of course, salespeople (and by extension, radio DJs) were designed by evolution to listen uncritically to motivational speakers. Because thinking for yourself? That would be efforting!
Labels: car radios, feel-good corporate tripe, language
