The weeks leading up to any election are always awash with torrents of too much verbosity and parched with trickles of too little action.
As local government elections loom in SA, we are once again having to listen to promises that may or may not be kept. It says a lot for humans and our ability to hope that centuries of history have not made us jaded and cynical. Well, not entirely jaded and cynical anyway. We might scoff at the platoon of paltry parties making puerile pledges to improve our lives, because centuries of less-than-good governance have taught us to expect disappointment, yet still we turn up at the polls and hope that our chosen candidates will deliver the services they say they will.
In Our Time of Corona it feels particularly perplexing and disingenuous that party leaders, who claim to have the health and welfare of their constituents at heart, happily amass large numbers of people to hear their manifestos, thereby putting at risk the lives of those they claim to hold so dear.
This is not the only paradox. Another strange term that comes up a lot before crosses are drawn on ballots is “service delivery”.
As one astute reader pointed out: “Service means ‘provision of assistance or advice’. Why now does one have to deliver provision of assistance? Is it not self-evident that there is no service unless it’s delivered?”
He is correct. The delivery of service is a service, in the same way as the delivery of a plate of soup is a service. You might as well say “service service”. (Do waiters on a cruise ship provide surface service, I wonder?)
Service, a noun dating back to the 12th century, comes from the same root as slavery and originally referred only to a church service. Later it was extended to tea, the military, rubbish collection, tennis, and almost anything you care to name.
Service became a back-formed verb in about 1926. You can, should you wish to, service a car or a debt, but be careful when telling someone you’ve just been out to service a client, particularly if you look a bit dishevelled when you return.
Isn’t it odd that in a world obsessed with short cuts, acronyms and abbreviations, we perversely burden ourselves with longer words or phrases, where short ones would suffice?
There is no need, for example, to say “personal belongings”, “past experience”, “future plans” or “a small minority”. If it belongs to you, it’s personal. If you’ve experienced it, it must have been in the past. If you’re planning something it must be going to happen in the future, and if it is a minority, it is by nature small.
Another one is “going forward”. It is possible to go backwards, of course, but the context in which this redundant phrase is used always refers to “what we are going to do next” and it is entirely unnecessary.
Similar irritants include “brand new" and “the very beginning”. What other kind of newness or beginning could there be? Maybe there’s a pre-school for beginnings that no one has told me about. In the same vein, “exactly the same” means exactly the same thing as “the same”.
An “added bonus” is simply a bonus, nothing more and nothing less. In music, a “live recording” is just a recording, because dead people tend not to lay down tracks.
Why we don’t lose these tautologies is an unsolved mystery. Or just a mystery. We’d save so much time and finger-effort if we kicked all the unnecessary words out of our written and spoken conversation.
In the (exact) same way, we could use short words instead of long ones. Serve is a perfectly serviceable word and a whole syllable shorter than service. Why not use it?
Bob Dylan, master lyricist and provider of service to humanity, knew this when he wrote the song Gotta Serve Somebody. Serve, not service. Well done, Bob. Now if only someone had told you that gotta is not a word.
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