Some coinages creep up on you, insidiously, perhaps inevitably, such as “juniorisation” – “the process of older and more experienced staff being pushed out of a workforce in favour of younger and less expensive people”. For those of us of a certain advanced age, such a process is almost unavoidable: the wisdom of youth, the need for fresh eyes…
Others come at you swinging a lead-filled sock. Take “dogfooding”. My faithful readers will know how much I deprecate the use of nouns as verbs, but this one really does take the biscuit. On closer inspection, thanks to the kind agency of the internet, I discover that it means “using the software you make, often in beta form, to work out the kinks”. What I think it really means is that you should do your R&D properly and thoroughly road-test what you’re trying before foisting it on other people.
Then there is “disruptive”. When I was at school, I could guarantee at least one use per school report for this word to describe my behaviour (always worn as a badge of honour). Lately, it has been used to describe innovative startups. Now it moves on yet again. Last week, there was a report about the country’s oldest brewer, Shepherd Neame, and its end-of-year figures, saying that the company was planning to use its heritage (God, what an overused word) to fight off “disruptive brewers”. I take this to mean small outfits producing craft beer that people actually want to drink rather than the mass-produced bilge water the big breweries purvey.
I might be maligning Shepherd Neame, but when its chief executive says he wants to appeal to the “beer curious”, I have my doubts. Too many small breweries have been swallowed up by the big boys, their singular characters lost in the process.
Or perhaps it’s just my age. I’d better look in my rear-view mirror, before Junior tries an overtaking manoeuvre.
• Jonathan Bouquet is an Observer columnist
