Beware of words that play tricks on you

Until recently it was a needy person who reached out to friends – reached out for help, that is. Now it is being used by people who don’t need much help at all, but want to benefit from the expression’s air of vulnerability and to seem worthy of some sympathy and assistance.

When a politician, for instance, talks about “reaching out”, he or she is reaching out for nothing more or less than your vote, your rubber- stamp, your approval. He is attempting to shrug off the public’s potential contempt for his kind. He’s saying it is tough out there and even if he might come across as slimy, manipulative and underhand, he is just Mrs Whatever’s little boy doing his best in a dog-eat-dog world.

And it’s not just politicians.

I recently sent an email to the “editor” of one of those things that look like magazines but are really just vehicles for selling advertising.

I was offering my services as a writer – and she replied, which is something of a result in this day and age.

She thanked me for “reaching out”.

And yes, she would be more than happy to print anything I wrote. But she wouldn’t be doing it on the traditional basis, the one that involves payment. She would be prepared to grant me the privilege of having my work make her publication look like the real thing, rather than a catalogue.

But being a salesperson rather than a journalist herself, she thought nothing of offering me nothing in exchange.

After all, writing is fun, and I had reached out to her, which in this context now makes sending a speculative email seem like a beggar reaching out with a polystyrene cup.

When you get a flier through your letterbox, advertising the services of a plumber, is he “reaching out” to you? No, he’s simply telling you he’s there if you need his services. And you can bet your mortgaged life he expects to be paid if he does do something for you.

To describe this as “reaching out” is simply a way of changing the tone of the transaction, in an attempt by the recipient to keep her money in her pocket.

On the other hand, some people are very impressionable when it comes to new usages. They will leap on words and expressions without thinking them through. And that’s not a sign of lack of intelligence, just laziness.

Then there are those who use new expressions to persuade us that they are modern, forward-thinking people, on the ball and part of the crowd.

“See? I’m one of you.” British politicians are currently on a mission to use the expression: “it’s a game-changer” in every speech they give, because it makes them sound sporty, alert and “innovative”, to use a vastly overworked word.

Politicians in TT are fond of telling us they are going to “treat with” something, perhaps because it sounds more serious than “we’re having a look at it” or “I’m going to talk about it but that’s all”. It may be simply a quirk of Trini English, but it comes across as a kind of shield to hide behind when nothing is really being done.

A despicable recent predecessor of “reaching out” in terms of deceitful use is the word “intern”, meaning an unpaid employee. This was a by-product of the old conundrum whereby you don’t get a certain job because you have no experience, and you can’t gain experience because no one will give you a job. The traditional ways of dealing with this problem were either apprenticeships, in which you earned a little and learned on the job until you had reached an officially approved level of expertise, or you simply started at the bottom, again on a low wage. But at least it was a wage.

Whoever came up with the modern idea of the completely unpaid intern must have been either blindly arrogant or downright callous. They only got away with it by giving it a name borrowed from the world of hospitals, where an intern is a recently qualified doctor who assists experienced practitioners in order to gain experience before being let loose on the public.

This sort of manipulation of meaning is becoming more and more common, and another example is the verb to “redact”.

This means editing, and editing is perilously close to censoring, so no one likes to have their words edited if it means having the meaning interfered with. Whoever came up with the idea simply picked a relatively unknown word and relied on the fact that most people didn’t really understand what it meant but couldn’t be bothered to find out.

So the lesson is: don’t let any new word pass unchallenged: it might be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.