Fox: These are not the verbs you seek...

Every now and then I run into a middle school English teacher, and it never turns out well.

When, I demand while still shaking hands, did you people stop teaching young people how to diagram a sentence? That’s why you can’t watch two minutes of TV without some egregious grammatical mistake, usually a noun-verb disagreement. And what about prepositions? Those are important, ya know, and must be properly deployed.

This is why I don’t get invited to a lot of cocktail parties.

For the record, most of them say they do march 13-year-olds up to the blackboard to draw diagrams with all of the subjects, verbs, prepositional phrases and whatnot in the right places. It’s good for their character and the clarity of their thinking, even if it feels a lot like tedious, pointless torture. So is math. So is most of junior high school.

What’s wrong with this picture, of course, is that blackboards went out with the Model A, so I’m sure the little angels are using a high-tech alternative that spares them even the embarrassment of trudging to the front of the class. Besides, they’re 13. For whatever reason, the message isn’t getting through.

I don’t entirely blame them or their teachers. They work in an environment in which the language is under attack and people cannot even keep nouns and verbs straight.

With a straight face, one local school recently declared in a press release that it was going to “cost contain,” which in a less pretentious era might have come out as simply “contain costs.” This makes as much sense as the politicians who “fundraise,” which used to be called raising funds or, more simply, grubbing for cash to pay for all those lovely, fact-filled ads we’ll be enjoying from now until November.

Don’t worry, your tax dollars paid for the “cost contain” gem. This kind of jargon – essentially a Jedi mind trick to cause the person hearing it to double-take long enough to reconsider asking any impertinent questions – generally makes its way into the local bloodstream via a high-priced consultant or seminar. Allow me to clean up a phrase that was once popular: If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, then baffle them with bunkum. That seems to be a good deal of what’s at play here.

There’s a certain cold irony, of course, in our schools being the worst jargon offenders, but after decades of covering schools, government, business, politics and the occasional UFO sighting, I’d have to say it’s true. And these are the people teaching our young people how to think.

I guess I’d consider it a good start if we could just keep nouns and verbs straight. Sometimes it’s a good verb turned into a clunky noun that smacks against the ear. “Remodel” comes to mind. But usually the flow is the other way. Why did we have to turn “effort,” “journal” and “fellowship” into verbs? They have perfectly plain alternatives: make an effort, keep a journal, try to make nice during coffee after church.

(Ahem: Google, text, Tweet, phone, fax, e-mail. All are nouns and verbs. We’d best get over it. I could make a righteous case for purity, but it would be like ordering the tide not to come in.)

Business is probably a distant second to the schools in euphemism and intentionally misleading language. This is the land where axed employees are preciously referred to as “let-goes,” as if one has charitably decided to free a butterfly or bluegill.

The government gets a good deal of deserved grief for obfuscation, but really it just can’t keep up. Whatever warmed-over pile of clichés the business crowd is tossing around today the government will pick over and half-heartedly adopt in about five years, well past the point that everyone else is so over it.

Does anyone really think the post office will ever move outside the box to become robustly customercentric?

No, neither did I.