Conservation Speak 1

No man is an island and no bureaucracy it seems is on its own these days. So curmudgeonly feelings towards the abuses of vocabulary seen among the local conservation folk should allow for the fact that they are ‘part of a culture’ that’s existing in the wider community. But what are we to make of people who invent a word like patrollee? This is not fiction. I’ve not had an authoritative definition of the word but believe it’s meant to be a new term for someone who patrols on a nature reserve. What exactly is wrong with patroller I don’t know. As far as I can tell it’s been coined by someone at Sheffield Wildlife Trust who will not be named to spare blushes. I get this word chucked back at me when I contact them to mention something they really ought to do – ‘one of our patrollees will deal with it’. I think they’re trying to give the impression they have an enthusiastic force of volunteers waiting to pounce on problems helping SWT tick a few community involvement boxes. My guess is there might at most be two but that could be an overestimate.

I wonder how many of the dodgy new words appearing have been invented by bureaucrats who spend just too much of their time attending meetings and are given to composing euphemistic ways of referring to mundane things? Meetings are a case in point: how many ‘attendees’ were at the last one? There’s a word that should never have risen from the cesspit of management speak. Attenders, please. This is the one that spawned the mutant patrollee and others. ‘EE’ is a suffix most correctly applied to one in a passive state who has had something done to him/it. So an attendee would be someone who has been attended upon. The active person is the one who does the attending and should be called an attender. But the stable door has long been open on this one and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it’s being taught in schools in this usage. But now it seems that all and everything that people do is being given the same treatment. Patrollee is one. Look out for these future delights to come in paperwork from the wildlife trust: What about a bird watchee, or twitchee, a mountain bikee, a farmee, dog-walkee; why bother with an extra ‘r’ on the end of voluntee, and what happened to those lookerees? Somewhere in the deep recesses of the office dictator’s mind is the idea that creating new terms, even for old things, is a means of gaining power if only because it temporarily bamboozles those who hear them for the first time.