The somnolent peace of the congregation in my local was rudely disturbed last week by a couple of strangers. Eager young types, all sharp suits and loud voices, they were prattling away, quite unconcerned by their intrusion, until one said, “We elaborate going forwards”, and the other said, “Well, that’s the point of successful marketing.” Only when everyone started laughing uproariously did they feel a modicum of shame and have the decency to continue sotto voce. Marketing indeed.
Also last week, I noticed the law firm Clifford Chance is reported to be considering appointing a “chief happiness officer” to ensure the firm is “the most vibrant, happy and uplifting place to work in the world”. I’d love to see the job description. You’d have to be a combination of Ken Dodd, the Marx Brothers and Tommy Cooper to be in with even a sniff of a chance and it smacks of all those other grandiose titles – “beverage dissemination manager” (bartender), “wizard of lightbulb moments” (marketing manager) – that cause such amusement to real people.
And what to make of Google’s new tool, an “inclusive language function”, which will flash up warnings if writers use words that “may not be inclusive to all readers” and will suggest alternatives. Among those that would fall foul of this device, it was reported, are John F Kennedy’s inaugural address, Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and Martin Luther King - not “fierce urgency”, but “intense urgency”. Why? A Google bod explained: “Our technology is always improving and we don’t yet… have a complete solution to identifying and mitigating all unwanted word associations and biases.”
For heaven’s sake, Google is only a bloody search engine, not judge and jury on “all that is correct”.
• Jonathan Bouquet is an Observer columnist
