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I will set down a few of their utterances, predominantly that of the woman who must, I think, have been at least in her mid-40s because she had been working for the Union since 1988. As it is no doubt important in such an environment to prove that you are unconventional, she wore a stud in her nose.

He does the stuff-y kind of stuff, not the strategy.

You”€™ve only got a very narrow administrative piece “€“ we need
something a little more matrix-y.

One of the challenges is that we are desperately trying to pull
back the project process.

That’s all been improved to deliver the capacity to deliver.

When we try to pin people down about what they”€™re going to deliver, we”€™re not good at it, it’s necessary to flex it but we don”€™t have a culture of it.

She’s passive-aggressive because she feels a feeling of being
left out.

There was too much emphasis on what wasn”€™t right, and we”€™ve
managed to shift the narrative.

From a performance management viewpoint, we could articulate a
lot more engagement.

I do not believe I am an inordinately concrete thinker, but I do like what I say occasionally to have some slight reference to non-abstractions, to have some kind of tethering to the world. After listening to this without pause for half an hour, I began to feel a kind of mental weightlessness, with zero-gravity thoughts. There was, however, a miasma of political correctness hovering over what was said: words such as sustainability, equality, liberation, non-discrimination and development were used from time to time.

As I prepared to leave the train I wondered whether to say anything to them. I decided against, for in fact I felt slightly sorry for them. Surely they must have been at least partially aware that what they said was impenetrable drivel unworthy of the human faculty of speech. It must be unpleasant to know that your job depends on your mastery of this type of verbigeration.

Perhaps, however, my sympathy was misplaced, for those who master it are often ruthless and ambitious, mediocre in everything except in the scale of their determination to rule some tiny roost or other, and be paid accordingly. The quid pro quo is that they must learn a new language, whose mastery is far from easy and which requires the exercise of skill: I am sure that if my readers will try to speak for only a few minutes in managerialese they will find it almost impossible, for meaning will keep breaking through their best attempts at meaninglessness. Doctors who go into management master the language so quickly because they have perforce heard so much of it already.

Managerialese is both a symptom and a sustainer of a social revolution. It is the revenge of the unscrupulous mediocre on the talented of principle.