Why do so many supposedly bright and well educated people despise the English language so passionately? It seems the passing of formal education in our own language has produced something far worse than mere indifference. Instead, we find a cheerful determination to bludgeon words into banal corporate gibberish that should be confined to a Dilbert cartoon. Or worse, an implacable desire to purge the language of all those messy, old-fashioned, 'oldspeak' words that just get in the way of the optimalised stakeholder paradigms that iteratively disbenefited 'newspeak' should synergise to facilitate user-centric corporacy. Innit.
'Disbenefits' sums up this malaise quite nicely. An ugly and wholly unnecessary word that I'm sorry to say has crawled into respectable dictionaries everywhere. This hasn't happened because it fulfills a need to eff the formerly ineffable, the usual if somewhat old-fashioned route to lexicographical recognition. Instead, it's there because professionals, seemingly everywhere, feel compelled to use obtuse language in a chest-beating bid to show how clever and, well, professional they are. After all, if you're being paid a lot to write something clever, you should scorn words like 'deficit', 'drawback', 'obstacle' or 'disadvantage' as opposing terms to 'benefit', and instead use something far more exclusive. Then you should repeat every sentence in the next line, paragraph and chapter, having raided the thesaurus for a gloss of original thought, safe in the knowledge that content will matter less than thickness or syllable-count.
Perhaps I'm just bitter, having discovered that far from being in the premiere league of the verbose, I'd barely qualify for the Sesquipedalian Paper Boys' XI by the standards of the workplace.
Anyway, this is good:
