[dc]H[/dc]ere’s an innocent enough quote, the source of which I will not reveal. It’s from the training materials for a large company’s products.
A brainstorming session with another person is often useful in this phase, particularly if that person is capable of constantly providing alternative viewpoints during discussions. (In many countries, this person would be described as being good at playing the Devil’s advocate). The analysis phase often benefits from two types of people, one of whom has excellent technical knowledge of the product, and another that constantly requires the first person to justify their thoughts and to think both logically and laterally.
This is just awful. See how many layers of wrapping there are on the phrase “Devil’s advocate”? Here’s the simplest correction; call this the base state:
“…particularly if that person is capable of constantly providing alternative viewpoints during discussions, as a Devil’s advocate.”
This way, the original point is stated, and then the phrase Devil’s advocate is used to clarify. Now we wrap it up as:
- Devil’s advocate
- fair enough
- playing the
- not actually the Devil’s advocate
- good at
- skilled, but maybe not actually doing it right now
- described as
- by somebody else
- would be
- if things were different
- this person
- tey
- In many countries
- And this is the reason for all this nonsense…
- ()
- we thought we should use parentheses, just in case.
Each of those bullet points is a “packaging” of Devil’s advocate, with the exception of the pronoun phrase.
The purported issue is familiarity of people in “many countries” with the term “Devil’s advocate”. If this were really the issue, this would certainly not be the right way to deal with it. If somebody is familiar with the phrase, then it needs no explanation. If not familiar, then no explanation will suffice, for using an unfamiliar phrase which must then be clumsily explicated does not bring clarity. And remember that clarity is what were were supposed to do with this phrase, because it immediately restates a more definitive wording. We had hoped to lean upon a familiar phrase to bring clarity to the immediately preceding sentence.
The real issue of course is political correctness running through our discourse, slitting throats and spilling ink. The large company in question is not so worried about the reaction of a confounded subcontinental to an unexpected “devil” reference. Odds are, he gets the referent (as he was not crippled by the US Federal education racket), and if not, he knows about dealing with Americans. They talk funny. No, the large company in question is worried about a domestic response, like white liberals who jump up and down in African robes of borrowed outrage, from those who have enough education to spot something strange in the language, but not enough brains to make it work.
This sort of tortured phrasing is the result of our status as hostages to the small-minded copyeditor who would have no job if not for the eternal patrol, vigilant against the splitting of infinitives, unaware or uncaring that the original prohibition sprang from an attempt to surreptitiously prove that English was suitable for translations of the Bible, because its grammar could be made to precisely match that of Latin, in which it is literally impossible to split an infinitive. As those standards fade, they have evolved a new cudgel–morally superior grammar.
Nope, nothing Orwellian about that.
