{"id":57115,"date":"2022-11-22T09:30:04","date_gmt":"2022-11-22T14:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=57115"},"modified":"2022-11-22T10:10:53","modified_gmt":"2022-11-22T15:10:53","slug":"sins-against-the-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=57115","title":{"rendered":"\"Sins against the language\""},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Bouquet, \"May I have a word about… the sins of Twitter, Meta and Amazon<\/a>\", The Guardian<\/em> 11\/20\/2022:<\/p>\n

[As if making thousands of people redundant were not bad enough, they compound it with their use of language]<\/span><\/p>\n

It won\u2019t have escaped your notice that the internet giants are going though turbulent times, with huge job losses announced at Twitter, Meta and Amazon. In the case of the last, it has been reported that the company is to start cutting 10,000 jobs within days to make its \u201cfulfilment centres\u201d more streamlined. In my day, a place where goods are stored, packed and sent to customers who have ordered them used to be known as a warehouse. […]<\/span><\/p>\n

And thank you to Roy Perry for the following: \u201cAn offering from the November magazine of Weardale Railway Trust (of which I am a member): \u2018Train operations have continued throughout the summer and ridership has been very encouraging.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It's good to see that (some) British writers are still clinging to the reins of their undocumented linguistic hobbyhorses. The OED tells us that fulfillment<\/em> in the sense \"The completion and dispatch of a customer's order\" dates back at least to 1819 (in the Sheffield Independent<\/em>, \"The speedy execution and satisfactory\u00a0fulfilment<\/span> of all Orders that may be entrusted to their care.\") And a 1979 Technical Report from the Commission of the European Communities, Problems of Document Delivery for the EURONET User<\/em><\/a>, includes this passage among others:<\/p>\n

It is recommended that the mechanism for direct telecommunications network transmission of document requests to fulfillment centre be developed, in which participating document fulfillment centres would be able to interrogate the parking file of the host and extract and have printed out, at the centre, all orders earmarked for it. This development should be undertaken concurrently with A, as it is merely a refinement of the system, requiring only that the document fulfillment centre be equipped with a terminal and printer.<\/span><\/p>\n

The warehouse where I had a summer job many years ago was a very different kind of place from today's \"fulfillment centers\": it was a building full of stacks of large packaged furniture, where shipments arrived from manufacturers and were sent out to retail stores, without any repackaging, by a relatively small staff.<\/p>\n

As for ridership<\/em>, a 1999 Guardian book review<\/a> (by a different writer) begins<\/p>\n

While listening in a desultory way to an otherwise desultory discussion about the future of public transport, I thought I heard John Prescott claim that ridership is growing. Ridership? I may be cloth-eared but I don't recollect hearing that word in this context before. Nor do any of the dictionaries that throng my house, noisily competing for my attention (\" 'Snot fair! What about me? You used rotten old Chambers last time!\") contain the word ridership. More cautious politicians might have said passenger utilisation rates, or even conveyance throughput, but Prescott (I think) said ridership. And why not? If newspapers can have readership, buses and trains can have ridership, and that's an end to the matter.<\/span><\/p>\n

The OED does say that ridership<\/em> in the sense of \"The number of passengers using a particular form of transport\" is \"Originally North American\", so perhaps it will be a few more decades before Mr. Bouquet accepts it in place of such straightforward alternatives as \"passenger utilisation rates\" or \"conveyance throughput\". Or perhaps not, since his \"May I have a word about..<\/a>.\" machine requires a steady supply of linguistic feedstock (\"peevestock\"?), including congenial theories about the allegedly responsible parties.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Bouquet, \"May I have a word about… the sins of Twitter, Meta and Amazon\", The Guardian 11\/20\/2022: [As if making thousands of people redundant were not bad enough, they compound it with their use of language] It won\u2019t have escaped your notice that the internet giants are going though turbulent times, with huge job […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-peeving"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57115"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57122,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57115\/revisions\/57122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}