Delivering Partnering Excellence

Someone Thought They Were Being Clever – June 2006

In Sedbergh, Cumbria, there are some council houses that haven’t yet been sold off, and at the entrance to the estate containing these houses, facing the main road, has gone up a large, yellow billboard. On it is proudly displayed the caption:

‘Delivering Partnering Excellence’.

Now although I speak pretty fluent English, I’ll don’t know what that means. The billboard is advertising the company that has the contract to upgrade the council houses. So not only is the yellow billboard ugly, it also contains a double-gobbledegerund. What a gem!

You don’t see so many of them about. Usually they’re just single gobbledegerund, though the board also has a couple of these for good measure, one of which says:

‘Achieving the decent homes standard by 2010’

Which suggests either that the work is going to drag on until 2010, or that the homes they do now will be sub-decent.

And the other single gobbledegerund says:

‘Delivering community regeneration’

Can someone or something deliver community regeneration?. How do you deliver community regeneration?

All of this embarrassment could have been spared the building firm, had someone slapped the marketing man on the wrist the moment that there popped into his mind the idea of using one of those dreaded gerunds! The gerunds appear innocuous but left unchecked have a tendency to scupper one’s float. I think we can write the next generation of English language style guide, for which I suggest the title, Shooting Oneself in the Footing. Now all we need is a subtitle.

A cartoon strip used to appear in the Daily Mirror, called The Perishers, and there was a bloodhound who spoke in gerunds and plurals, with phrases such as, ‘I lost my sense of smelling’ and ‘old chaps’. I shall scour the car boot sales. These books were a portend of English language to come.