It’s the “ing” word I’m talking about; not a participle hanging on its own, or dangling likewise, it’s the “hanging and dangling participle”. I claim it as a new grammatical usage, and it’s everywhere.

It’s the Home Office logo: Building a Safe, Just and Tolerant Society: it’s there on the social-services minibus: Driving for the Caring Community. (How about “Caring for the Driving Community” on your parking ticket? Coming soon, no doubt.) Creating Opportunity Worldwide, claims the British Council (Really? Sounds like a business plan). ACAS: Making Work Work (hello, in there? Anyone?). HMSO: Making Information Easy to Find Use and Share (Are you joking?). Compulsory pension schemes, imposed by diktat, are described as “moving beyond the current voluntary system”. Even the local plumber is at it: Keeping the Water Moving. Citizen writers everywhere, beware — Hanging the Dangling Participle is the noose with which you kill yourself.

It’s all velvet-glove stuff, I fear, disguising the fingers at the throat. It has been going on a long time. Today’s version of Work Makes You Free over the camp gates turns smoothly into Making Work Choices Easier. In we’d all troop, believing it was all okay, not wanting to make a fuss. Go into Barclay’s Bank — Providing Banking Services for Account Holders — (well, what else?) and protest about some new outrageous hidden charge, and the other customers will turn as one and shut you up, murmuring Barclay’s Bank Is Doing Its Best. (Barclays can have that one for free.)

Our ideas of what we are and what we want to be are limited by the language we use. The hanging, dangling participle has no conclusion. It’s like a soap opera, it just goes on and on, with no particular point, no attempt to give dramatic shape or finality. That’s why the HDP, like the soap opera, is so insidious. You keep watching, keep hoping, but it never tells you why or how, it stays forever in the present. The little vans buzz here and there, with their messages of content and okay-ness, and their work is never done.

We’ve been at it a long time, of course, burying meaning in verbiage so nobody can get at it. In the 1940s, George Orwell referred in his essay Politics and the English Language to the elimination of the single verb: how “break” becomes “render inoperative”, how “stop” becomes “militate against”. In the 1950s, Nancy Mitford used the term non-U (non-Upper) to disparage the ugliness of bogus-genteel language. Her communist sister Jessica worried more about what she called L-speak, or left-wing usage, which she saw as prolix and self-aggrandising. An L-man does not “get up and speak” at a meeting. He “contributes to the discussion”. Nobody says “only time will tell whether we got it right”, they prefer “that policy will be tested in the crucible of struggle”. It sounds more convincing, more important, a call to action. And it is bogus.

See the prolixity now in Guardian job descriptions, see it in what came over my e-mail today. Academia, too, has caught the Disease of Lost Meaning, of which the hanging, dangling participle is but a symptom, and the attempted cure more words and yet more words. This was an invitation to a symposium on Affect, Interaction and Technology at Cornell University, intended to Encourage Interdisciplinary Dialogue about the Significance of Affect in both Technological Design and History. There are two pages of it. I remain none the wiser.

Recently, I gave a reading at a public library in Essex. Afterwards, the audience was handed an “evaluation” sheet to fill in. It was long and complicated, but in essence it inquired whether the punters had got their money’s worth. And had the local authority got value for their expenditure? The audience could perhaps have scrawled “boring” or “okay” on their bits of paper, but then what would those evaluating the evaluations have done for a living? Better had the audience gone home quietly talking among themselves. Better had the evaluators stayed home and read a novel. But I fear that in the West we are all looking for occupations, to find something — anything — to do, even if it is nonsensical. We ourselves, not just our participles, are hanging, dangling, and strangling in verbiage and euphemism.

I’m not against nonsense as such. There were those Edward Lear Jumblies who went to the Western Seas:

“And they bought an Owl and a useful Cart,
And a Pound of Rice and a Cranberry Tart
And a hive of silvery bees”

Now I can understand that. It’s friendlier than, “Affect is becoming a central theme in fields as diverse as cognitive science, linguistics and government”, and less sinister than the Inland Revenue’s Tax Doesn’t Have To Be Taxing.

Fay Weldon’s most recent novel, Mantrapped, is published by Fourth Estate

Fay Weldon discusses Nonsense Speak with Armando Iannucci, D J Taylor and David Freeman at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Saturday, April 16, at 6pm

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