Red tape, optionality and false ranges

Week 9 of Words of the Week, my dictionary of poor language usage

Red Tape

There are lots of tired phrases that were once vivid and they can be brought back to life now that everyone has forgotten the original reference. “Red tape” is a good example. Is there anything more dreary than a business complaining about bureaucracy? Yes, there is. It is a business complaining about bureaucracy and using the tired expression “red tape”. Yet how much more intriguing might the complaint sound if we reminded the reader that public documents have often been bound in red tape and that the first person to popularize the use of red tape to signify the obstruction and circumlocution of an inefficient state was Charles Dickens. In his early days as a parliamentary sketch writer Dickens received the copies of Hansard bound in red tape and the phrase turned up regularly in his fiction, in The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Dorrit and especially in the satire of the Court of Chancery in Bleak House. Add in some of this and your complaint about regulation is already sounding a little less obviously self-regarding.

Optionality

As TS Eliot once almost wrote, “human beings can only bear so much optionality”. So too functionality and all species of -ality except personality, which is exactly what these words lack. You mean your options. Optionality is how the robots will speak when they take over. Perhaps they have already if the example of Michael Barry, an investor advising Tesla to issue more shares, is anything to go by: “You’d be cementing permanence and untold optionality”. If only the optionality had indeed gone untold.

False Ranges

It sounds euphonious and clever to write something like “over time they sold everything, from screwdrivers to washing-up liquid”. But a moment’s reflection shows you that this is a false range. There is no spectrum that runs from screwdrivers to washing up liquid. If you were to fill in the intermediate values in the range, what would they be and in what order? Hub cabs, plectrums, thimbles and toothbrushes, perhaps? Is that the right order of progression? The answer, of course, is that the range is, in fact, ridiculous. The writer does not mean that is a genuine progression from screwdrivers to washing-up liquid. The sentence tells us nothing concrete about what they sell (apart from screwdrivers and washing-up liquid). All it says, really, is that this company sells all manner of unrelated stuff. It would be better to offer a list of five or six items for sale and make it plain that there is plenty more where that came from.