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My parents’ generation all had jobs. Today’s workers, lucky creatures that we are, have “roles”. At least we did – until the financial crisis hit. Because, where roles are created and offered, jobs are invariably cut and lost.

The differences extend further. A job is something you merely do for money between the hours of nine to five. Those of us who hold down jobs find our fulfilment elsewhere. Like at home. Or with our families. Or by learning the flute.

In contrast, a role is something you pursue rather than merely hold down to keep the wolf from the door. It’s something so spiritually, emotionally and intellectually inspiring that it engulfs your whole being such that you’d gladly do it for free and to the exclusion of all other activity.

In fact, so privileged do you feel to have an exciting, challenging role (for thus are they always dubbed in the recruitment ads), that you regularly find yourself putting in unpaid hours.

That’s because having a “role” makes you special. The word stems from the obsolete French “roule”, meaning “roll” and referring to the roll of paper on which the actor’s part was written. And so it calls to mind the big roles in great drama – Ibsen’s Nora or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, say. They’re complex people. Important. Special. Unique

In contrast, jobs are common. Unextraordinary. Dispensable. There’s only one Hamlet, but thousands of jobbing actors. A jobbing actor is just one who can’t get any decent roles.

Hmm, can anyone else see why employers might have an interest in stoking this insidious little piece of linguistic inflation?

Not only are you more likely to view your work as the most important thing in your life, but aren’t you easier to manipulate as an individual than if you were part of a crowd? There’s something rather unnervingly collective about people with “jobs”. Unlike roles, jobs are something unions tend to fight for.

But the economic crisis has recently exposed the great mendacity of the word “role”. You’ll have noticed it if you’ve recently been made redundant. Remember how they tempted you in with a role (singular)? And didn’t it suddenly become one of several jobs (plural) when they decided you and your colleagues were no longer economically useful?

It’s why, whenever there are mass redundancies, you never see headlines announcing “GM to cut 21,000 roles” or “4 million roles lost since Obama took office”.

The lesson? By all means put in the hours, do the best you can, and try to enjoy what you do to earn a crust.

But don’t think of your job as a “role”, because should you lose it, you’ll likely find yourself bereft of your only source of self-esteem.

Better to swap your role for a job and spend all that extra free time learning the flute.

There’s a nasty little punctuation habit that instantly gives your age away. It’s called the comma splice, and I’ve noticed it’s mostly used by writers under the age of 35.

I don’t blame them for not being able to punctuate properly. After all, it’s not their fault they were unfortunate enough to go to school after it was decided grammar was surplus to the requirements of a rounded education.

But, of all the punctuation crimes out there, it’s the comma splice that upsets me the most.

I’ll explain why in a minute, but first, for all you youngsters out there, what is a comma splice?

Simple: it’s when a comma is used to connect two independent clauses, an independent clause being a group of words that can stand by itself as a separate sentence.

Here are two examples I came across in a magazine recently:

Summer in Rome is always great fun, here are our suggestions for you to make the most of it.

Lastly, we should mention the Protestant cemetery in Testaccio, although a little bit of a walk from Trastevere, this hidden treasure is well worth a visit.

I only became aware of the comma splice’s existence about four or five years ago, but I have to tell you that it was a real loss of innocence for me to discover that people would actually think of writing like this.

Worse, I’ve noticed that non-sentences like the above have become pandemic in recent years. They’ve even started appearing on huge advertising billboards – a sign, perhaps, that even professional copywriters are using the comma splice.

There are a number of ways to correct the offending sentences quoted above. You could separate the independent clauses with a more forceful full stop.

Summer in Rome is always great fun. Here are our suggestions for you to make the most of it.

Lastly, we should mention the Protestant cemetery in Testaccio. Although a little bit of a walk from Trastevere, this hidden treasure is well worth a visit.

Or, in the first example, you could introduce a conjunction such as “so”:

Summer in Rome is always great fun, so here are our suggestions for you to make the most of it.

In the second example, a little rewrite introducing the relative pronoun “which” fixes the problem:

Lastly, we should mention the Protestant cemetery in Testaccio, which although a little bit of a walk from Trastevere, is a hidden treasure that’s well worth a visit.

If you’re still uncertain about what constitutes a comma splice - and how to fix one, do check out this useful exercise, which appears on the Bristol University website (presumably because students at even our better universities have poor grammar these days).

Why I hate the comma splice

What’s distressing about the prevalence of the comma splice is that it creates stream-of-consciousness babble in which unconnected thoughts run hyperactively into each other.

Furthermore, the comma splice betrays in its user a complete ignorance of how the English language works.

To avail yourself of the comma splice, you must have no grasp of what a sentence is. Which means you have no grasp of what a verb is. Or the subject of the sentence. Or the difference between dependent clauses and independent clauses. Or how to connect ideas with conjunctions. Or how to temper the flow of your copy with elegant introductory participial phrases.

(Yes, I’m aware that I’m punctuating clauses here as if they were full sentences. It’s done consciously to achieve a punchier style. Breaking the rules is fine if you understand them – and know why you’re breaking them.)

In short, use the comma splice and you’re telling me that you’re inarticulate, incapable of expressing ideas in a coherent way, and that you have no ear for the rhythms of the English language.

It surprises me, then, that such relatively minor infractions as apostrophe crimes, eccentric hyphenation and use of scare quotes elicit mouth-foaming fulmination among grammar geeks. Some of them even have whole blogs devoted to them.

Yet the far-more-troubling comma splice remains, as far as I’m aware, a relatively unremarked upon offence.

One might compare the difference in gravity to mistakes in music. An apostrophe crime, say, is the equivalent of a wrong note – a technical glitch that may elicit sniggers from your audience but won’t necessarily impair the piece as a whole.

A comma splice, however, is on a par with eccentric phrasing and being consistently one bar ahead of the rest of the band: your poor ear and general lack of musicianship will make your audience wince in pain.

I’m very excited to have a letter in today’s FT. If you’ve ever been tempted to use the word “anticipate” as a synonym for “expect” (or felt grouchy at people who do) do take a look at it here.

Sometime last year our traffic wardens became “civil enforcement officers”. Actually, there had been an intermediary stage I’d missed when they were known as “parking attendants”.

Such inflationary language is, as ever, clearly laughable. Not only have we gone from a job with four syllables to five to a whopping eight, but in the more recent upgrade the abbreviated form of the title promotes the worker from a mere PA to a grand-sounding CEO.

Never mind that most people have little clue about what a civil enforcement officer does. Doesn’t every normal person still call them traffic wardens?

Still, I’m sure that the self-importance felt by the possessors of pompous and weighty-sounding titles goes some way towards compensating for the insidious wage deflation that many commentators believe has been a feature of the UK economy in recent decades.

But sadly, in this instance, the impressive ring of “civil enforcement officer” is, I think, rather undermined by the lack of a hyphen. An encounter with a “civil-enforcement officer” sounds a bit scary and to be avoided. An encounter with a “civil enforcement officer”, on the other hand, sounds like it might feel like being gently nagged by Hugh Grant:

“Hello, terribly sorry to bother you. Um, this is a little awkward and I do hate to be such an awful nuisance, but would you mind terribly moving your car? It’s just that it’s such a bother for other drivers, you see. Thank you so much, that’s really very kind of you.”

So two pieces of advice here:

1. If adding a hyphen aids understanding, please use one. As Lynn Truss points out in Eats, Shoots and Leaves, “extra-marital sex”, “pickled-herring merchant” and “the two hundred-odd members of the Conservative Party” all take on quite different meanings if the hyphen is removed.

2. No one is convinced by inflationary job titles. If your sole source of professional self-esteem comes from calling yourself a “vision clearance executive” instead of a window cleaner or a “nourishment production assistant” instead of a dinner lady, then perhaps it’s time for a career change.

I’m pleased to announce that the winner of Friday’s strapline competition is Lucy Nixon. Here’s the winning entry:

That was fun! Here are my guesses:

1. Just do it
2. Think global; act local
3. The best a man can get
4. Every little helps
5. Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach
6. It could be you
7. A Mars a day helps you work rest and play
8. No Financial Times, no comment
9. Let your fingers do the walking
10. The Future is Orange

Glad you found it a fun exercise, Lucy - we are clearly kindred spirits! A copy of Strunk and White will be winging its way over to you soon.

It’s always a good idea to get inside your clients’ heads, so I’ve taken 10 famous advertising slogans and translated them into bad corporatese. Can you work out the straplines the copywriter came up with after being sent these clunky first drafts by the guys from corporate?

I’ll send a copy of Strunk & White (or your preferred book of equivalent value) to the first person who sends me all the correct answers here.

1. Individuals who purchase our goods are advised to action their sporting deliverables at their earliest convenience and with the minimum of delay.

2. Our members cogitate upon the possibility of delivering environmental change across multiple geographies while simultaneously tasking themselves with key deliverables within the confines of their own immediate vicinity.

3. This product is the world’s most superior tool for delivering grooming solutions to all individuals of the masculine gender.

4. Financial efficiencies are delivered to our retail customers on an incremental basis, thus assisting them in their efforts to facilitate the maintenance of their household’s budgetary rigour.

5. This hop-based beverage has corporeal rejuvenating capabilities that are greatly in excess of those possessed by our competitor brands.

6. There is the possibility for all those engaged in this twice-weekly national wagering activity to achieve outstanding returns on their initial speculative outlay and thus fulfil their utmost aspirations.

7. All those who participate in the consumption of our confectionary foodstuff on a daily basis will receive assistance in all aspects of their labour activities, relaxation efforts, and recreational pursuits.

8. Unless one is fully apprised of our journalistic output, one is not positioned to deliver an informed perspective on the pertinence of all matters relating to business, politics and the economy.

9. Individuals in search of information regarding the telephone numerals relating to key business contacts are encouraged to permit their digital extremities to engage in ambulatory activities, thus eliminating the need for extreme effort exertion and ensuring the saving of time.

10. There is an expectation on our behalf of positivity going forward. Furthermore, it is our strategy and objective that all points in time from this moment onwards are deemed to: be situated between red and yellow in the visible spectrum; have a wavelength of about 585 – 620 nm; and posses a hue of 30° in HSV colour space.

Today, in a post on his Word Sell blog, content optimisation guru Brad Shorr offers some great advice to anyone thinking about launching a business blog.

In his post, Brad asks other bloggers how we prepared for our entry into the blogosphere. Looking back – though I didn’t know it at the time – I think I prepared for blogging by doing a PhD. Read the rest of this entry »

This addendum to my previous blog entry on apostrophes is dedicated to the graphic designer friend of mine who recently posted a cry for help on Facebook, asking which was correct: 100’s or 100s.

Naturally, her writer friends told her to ditch the apostrophe, which she did. Sorry to distress any literate people out there, but I have to inform you that she has since revealed that she was told to put them all back in. Read the rest of this entry »

Having worked with more than my share of tiresome subs who clearly quite enjoy getting their knickers in a twist about other people’s apostrophe crimes, I don’t want to get too snarky about the rights and wrongs of this important little punctuation mark.

After all, you can’t blame people for not knowing how to punctuate if they’ve never been taught how to do it. (I tend to agree with the journalism teacher who once told me she could tell a student’s age from their punctuation. Few people under forty have a clue, because they had the misfortune to go to school after it was decided that grammar was too elitist to teach).

But if you care about your business you need to know that you will be judged if you get it wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Filling in a form recently (I don’t recall what for), I was asked to state my gender. The question was particularly puzzling as all I was given was a box in which to insert M or F.

It’s not the first time I’ve noticed this use of the word “gender” when what the author intended was (avert your eyes now if you’re of a sensitive disposition) “s-e-x”. Read the rest of this entry »