Transitory Transitives

[steepholm]

The ability to turn almost any part of speech into a verb is one of the glories of English, but it can be quite distracting. Take my desultory skimming of the internet this morning. Yes, they've discovered a Beowulf-style feasting hall under a village green in Kent, but I'm fixated on the phrase, "the ability to own and upkeep a horse". Yes, Mitt Romney has told porkies about Chrysler moving Jeep production to China, but I'm hung up on the image of "the Toledo plant shuttered and its more than 3,500 workers idled".

Each country's euphemism for redundancy says something about its culture. In the USA, it appears, workers are "idled" - a loaded term recalling the country's Puritan roots and the kinds of hands that the Devil makes work for. Here in the UK, people are "let go" - which sounds suitably passive aggressive, almost (and especially if done to the backing of Engelbert Humperdinck) as if it were done at the employees' instigation. And in France, of course, they use a culinary metaphor: firms are dégraissé. Bon appetit.

Okay, it's a lighter-than-air theory. That's why I float it.

Comments

[cmcmck]

It also used to be 'hands' that were laid off (there's another one) as though the rest of the worker didn't matter!

[colorwheel]

i hate when someone's phone-call-ending phrase is, "well, i'll let you go." whether or not i secretly wanted to go, i hate it.

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

I had actually never heard 'idled' before just now; it's always been 'laid off', to distinguish from the more accusatory 'fired'.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

"Idled" is usually used here about a temporary shut-down: workers are "idled" by a storm, factories by a strike, machinery by a shortage of fuel. I think it's only very recently that "idled" came to mean fired.

In the US, when you're fired the person whose job it is to fire you says, "I'm sorry but it looks like we're going to have to let you go." Which if only Pharaoh had said to Moses!

My pet peeves are the verbings of impact and reference. I don't mind contact though my mother does. She also hates prey as an adjective ("I was as prey to a tendency to fail to notice the before-referenced lion and how it could impact herd morale as the next gazelle"), and has managed to induce a similar allergy in me. Also to the massing of attributive nouns ("herd morale").

[sovay]

"the ability to own and upkeep a horse".

That is not correct.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

"Shuttered" seems to me to be normal US usage, but I'd never heard "idled" used like that. It seems especially inapt for auto workers, given that it's car engines that are usually idled.

We use both "let go" and "fire," but they mean different things -- if you have your job taken away due to some specific reason you supposedly weren't doing it right, that's being fired, while being "let go" implies they couldn't afford to keep you on, nothing personal. (Anyone else remember Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer protesting indignantly that he was not fired, he was let go?)