GRANULAR BALLS

I have worked with management consultants now for over thirty years. They have a language all of their own which bears little resemblance to that which most of us use. It makes liberal use of jargon, cliché and strangled metaphor. I jotted down a few of the more common words and phrases from a recent meeting I had with a firm of management consultants who were discussing some project or other. My least favourite phrase was: ‘Once we’ve transitioned through the gate,’ followed closely by ‘That’s an absolute no-brainer.’ I’ve heard enough ‘blue-sky thinking’, ‘show-stoppers’ and ‘hard-hitters’ to keep me in muffins for a week, and if I hear the word ‘caveated’ again, I can’t promise to be responsible for my actions. As for ‘fluffy bunny stuff’ I leave that for you to deal with. However, I did learn three brand-new words. One was ‘leverage’, pronounced ‘lev’ rather than ‘leev’ and used, appallingly, as a transitive verb, rather than a noun. The second was ‘granularity,’ though in what context it was meant to be used, I really have no idea. The third was ‘nugatory.’ Now, I always thought that ‘nugatory’ was a sign-off phrase from one trucker to another in an American motor vehicle convoy, but I can’t be absolutely precise. Admittedly, the sum total of my knowledge about convoys is drawn from a country song about the subject that was released in the 1970s by a chap named CW McCall, if those were indeed his initials. If memory serves, this song was then plagiarised and satirised by a couple of risibly-permed British pop music disc-jockeys in the Smashey and Nicey mould. Whereas the American lyrics appeared to be interestingly ironic – note: ‘Well, we shot the line and we went for broke/With a thousand screamin' trucks/ An' eleven long-haired Friends a' Jesus/ In a chartreuse micra-bus’, the British ones were just plain juvenile. I seem to recall that one phrase in one of the songs went something like ‘That’s nugatory, rubber duck.’ On referring to my trusty Collins Gem dictionary, the word doesn’t appear, neither does ‘granularity’, though ‘granular’ means ‘of, or like grains.’ Consultants, perhaps in the same manner as William Blake, ‘see the world in a grain of sand,’ whilst we ordinary mortals clearly lack the granularity and, in many cases, in the words of the immortal Para Handy, ‘the Agility.’