What’s that in plain English?

I had one of those emails journos dread today–the one where a contact for a story tells you you’ve got something wrong. But I was relieved to read it and discover that it was actually about something I’m pretty sure I got right, but the (very personable) PR who sent it would like to be wrong.

I’d written a story about a company whose staff were being investigated for insider trading, and late in the day the company announced that the staff in question had “stepped down”.

Now I hate this term. Its just a euphemism, synonymous with “resign”. Which itself is a now-accepted legalistic euphemism for “sacked”. So I translated the company’s “step down” into “resign” in my article, and that’s what the mild complaint was about.

There’s a sort of blandifying of terminology that’s been going on here for some years. We all know how it works: x is caught with his hands in the till (it’s normally a he), and in the old days he would have been called into the boss’ office and given the boot.

Nowadays, the boss provides him with a resignation letter, drafted by the company’s lawyers, and tells him to sign it. Everyone’s a winner: x gets to say he wasn’t sacked, and the company gets a contract binding what x can subsequently say and do about the situation.

The thing is, everyone knows this trick now, so the euphemism has had to move on. Now the boss says there’s an investigation, and x is just quitting his position temporarily. The impact of the news is softened by being split into two announcements, one of which will only come out when the investigation concludes and the whole thing is old news. It’s a classic “reputational management” shell game.

The idea here seems to be to redefine “resignation” as an irrevocable move, whereas “stepping down” or “stepping aside” is a temporary process potentially followed by reinstatement.

But to my knowledge, both legally and lexically, they all describe the same thing. Resigning just means you stop doing something. You can start doing it again. You can resign from a particular role without leaving the company. It’s nothing permanent. Indeed, we already have a good legal term for irrevocable departure: “termination with prejudice”. PRs don’t like using that one. It sounds very bad.

Am I being too bolshie about this? I’ve had this “step down”/”resign” ding-dong with PRs before and I’ve asked lawyers about it too, but no one’s ever given me any sound basis for the distinction. The “stepped down” neologism seems to want it both ways–to imply the decisiveness of “we sacked him” while maintaining the blandness of “we are looking into the matter and will cooperate with all relevant authorities”.

I suspect that some PRs now see “resign” as meaning “irrevocably quit” precisely because they’re so used to using it as a euphemism for “terminated with prejudice” that they think the meanings of the phrases are the same. But they’re not.

Still, I feel linguistic evolution is moving against me. Journos tend to parrot the phrasing on press releases, both for the rubbish reason of laziness and for the more justifiable reason that they don’t want to misquote anyone. That means that, language being built on common usage, the PR industry’s insistence on this neologism will eventually see it find its way into the dictionary.

But I’m a language curmudgeon. I shudder when I see “enormity” used to descibe something big but not too dreadful, or “alright” used to descibe something other than a catchy song by Supergrass. So I get grumpy about being enlisted in an attempt to airbrush the English language for the benefit of those who can afford to hire PRs.