Commenting on the effects of COVID-19 on the housing market, a real-estate executive said yesterday that she thought there’d be ‘less transactions in the sales area’.
I collapsed, of course.
The word ‘less’ is wrong for a start. And ‘in the sales area’ is just inflated rubbish speech. What she should have said was that there’d be ‘fewer sales’. That’s all. No more, no less.
Pedant! I hear you scream. Yes, but there’s more to it than that. My best argument about improving writing and speaking is this: imagine the billions of dollars the Australian economy would save annually if we used English better. Imagine if professionals and bureaucrats stopped protecting their patches with convoluted and wordy jargon. Imagine if all of us thought about and willed ourselves to communicate better in shorter, simpler sentences.
And there’s an even finer argument that you may laugh at. The best written and spoken English has great elegance and beauty. And it couldn’t be bad for a culture to pay more attention to those attributes.