Everything has been “ramping up” lately: the capacity for virus testing, the readiness to reopen workplaces, and so forth. But why ramping? We are surely not meant to think of the sense of “ramp” (from 1819) that means a deliberate swindle or fraud, such as announcing that you have done more tests than you actually have because a third were just posted out. The modern sense of “ramp up”, from 1977, indeed describes financial chicanery – to artificially inflate the price of a stock in order to make a killing – before being adopted by industry to mean increasing production quickly.
As it is used today, “ramping up” is one of those terms of corporate jargon meant to make things sound more exciting than they really are, as though beancounters and bureaucrats were stunt drivers. “Ramping up” production of something sounds more macho and glamorous than merely “increasing” it, while committing to no extra information.
We are not, presumably, supposed to notice that what ramps up can come crashing down, or that a ramp might also be a slippery slope. In the face of such senseless bluster, the reliably phlegmatic British people have, it appears, mainly been ramping up their consumption of alcohol.
• Steven Poole’s A Word for Every Day of the Year is published by Quercus.
