That Was The Week That Was 17-21 April 2023
Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly of the Language
We spoke last week about the use of language, and with the gift of language, the gift of cursing. Little did I know that accursed language would come along just so soon thereafter. We could not go one week, ONE WEEK, without committing significant butchery to the language. Cursing might be the only option we have.
Monday and Tuesday tip=toed by with no significant damage done. We did survive a real scare on Wednesday when in passing the ETS revision and various other parts of the TEN-T package, we were told it had been given a green light, rather than that most ugly of gerunds ‘greenlit’. But that tiny mercy was not able to sustain what was to come.
Those of sensitive disposition should look away now. You may have seen that SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded soon after take-off on Thursday. Almost faster than the debris shower were the lawyers and spin doctors. The rocket did not blow up, they said, it had a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’. That sounds so much more reassuring. Rapid unscheduled disassembly? The bloody thing exploded! It was heart-breaking that they did not note that the scattered debris had inappropriate interfaces with the terrain.
It has long been said that English, that bastardising language par excellence, forces you to choice nationality when speaking. If you want to sound like a lawyer, you speak French. If you are talking with your mates, perhaps in a pub, you speak German. If you have been in a car accident, in court, you talk about the collision. If your rocket malfunctions, it explodes. At the pub, you were in a crash. Your rocket blew up. But now we have a new option. If you want to talk like an American attorney, you were in a rapid unscheduled deacceleration arising from inappropriate maintenance of distance criteria. Or something like that. Your rocket had a rapid unscheduled disassembly. It is the 99% of US attorneys giving the rest of them a bad name.
Right on cue, on Friday lawyers were at it again, this time in court in The Netherlands, arguing over the words ‘fly sustainably’. That is what KLM is offering to its customers, with its move to shift short-haul passengers to rail and other moves at Schiphol airport. Greenpeace has taken offence at that use of the words and brought out one of their favourites in response: greenwashing. Expect more of this. At the same time, we learnt that an aviation museum in Dallas, the Airline History Museum, had had, and here I quote, ‘its doors abruptly shuttered’. How one shutters a door is an open question, but not to whoever wrote this tripe. He or she can expect no mercy from me on the grounds that it was not described as a rapid unscheduled locking event, or similar.
All of which brings to mind perhaps one of the Bard’s greatest suggestions: first thing we do, we kill all the lawyers.