In the 1990s tv comedy Keeping Up Appearances, the wonderful Patricia Routledge played Hyacinth Bucket, a middle-aged woman obsessed with etiquette and visible respectability. Her keen desire for social superiority is surely a sign of deep insecurity, and was the comic dynamo of the sitcom, which lampooned this petit-bourgeois obsession. As you might expect, Hyacinth’s speech was a key component of this deluded quest, and, embarrassed by her name’s ‘common’ connotations, she insisted on pronouncing it ‘Bouquet’.
I remember also, back in the days of black-and-white television, how Harold Steptoe protested to his father that they were not ‘rag and bone men’ but ‘salvage recovery operatives’. Galton and Simpson then were having fun with this nearly sixty years ago.
Taking my cue from the sitcom, I describe as the ‘Hyacinth Bucket Syndrome’ the use of over-inflated, grandiose, and pompous language to convey a sense of importance and superiority. In its context it is ridiculous and disproportionate, impresses only the impressionable, and exposes the user as dishonest. It is often an attempt, to use an American expression which I’d never heard until Barack Obama used it a few years ago, to put lipstick on a pig, and our popular discourse these days seems awash with it. Hapless individuals in call centres appear made to speak like this from scripts, but sadly, like all linguistic vices, it spreads more widely through normalisation.
King’s English delights in identifying and exposing the pretentious and foolish, always though, I hasten to add, ‘punching up’; intention is everything. ‘How may I help you?’ we’re asked, or even, ‘How may I assist you? as if the more direct modal ‘can’ is thought somehow low, vulgar or impolite. Not the simpler and more direct ‘how can I help?’ There’s something a bit John Inman about these usages, but without the self-deflating comic irony. And I’m sure you’ve all heard this at some time or other: ‘We’re experiencing a high call volume this morning.’ What? Turn the wretched volume settings down then! Oh, I see . . . you mean that a lot of people are trying to call you. Well why didn’t you . . . oh never mind, don’t bother. You get the picture.
This of course goes on all the time. People can be vain and pretentious, like Hyacinth, and if we’re really honest, it would be hard for any of us to “cast the first stone”. Most of the time it doesn’t matter. Such people only make fools of themselves, and provide the rest of us with innocent fun at their expense. So when does it cross a line? For me, it’s always about dishonesty in a public or commercial context. It’s simply unethical to pretend to be what you are not, especially if there’s a financial element involved as well. Perhaps I’m just too much like Benjamin the donkey in Animal Farm, cynical and impervious to humbug, even though most instances might be relatively harmless. But, over-anxious by nature, I’m always aware of the ‘thin end of the wedge’, which here means that although something might be relatively anodyne now, if we don’t speak out it’ll rapidly become a whole lot worse, then embedded, and finally irreversible.
The commercial world is full of linguistic over-reach, but of the many examples I could cite, I’m going now to pick out ‘AFC’, as in ‘AFC Sudbury’, for a four-paragraph roughing up. This is only the latest example to come to my attention, and follows in the wake of AFC Wimbledon and AFC Bournemouth. It needs to be unpicked slowly, so I hope you’ve got nothing else to do for the next five minutes. Let’s begin at the beginning: what does ‘AFC’ stand for? Answer, ‘Association Football Club’. Well done if you got that at home, as Richard Osman says. So now we have ‘Association Football Club Sudbury’ (or substitute any other offender). English words, undeniably, but not English syntax (word order). ‘Sudbury AFC’ would at least follow English syntax. If it were this, there’d be little to complain about; it would after all be a straight description of the organisation concerned, even if the term ‘Association Football’ has a distinctly 19th century ring about it, with connotations of gentlemanly Corinthians and Old Etonians in their hooped jerseys and handlebar moustaches. ‘FC’ is a widespread terminal addition to many club names up and down the land, and does well enough.
What’s so wrong then? Let’s look firstly at what English syntax is, in this context. Adjectives normally precede the noun or noun phrase. ‘The bright sun’, ‘the corrupt Prime Minister’ and so on. This is known as premodification, in other words when the modifier, the word which modifies or alters our reading of the noun, comes before it. In this particular, English differs from languages such as French or Italian, in which adjectives follow nouns. This is ‘postmodification’. In ‘AFC Sudbury’, ‘Sudbury’ behaves as the adjective, giving detail to ‘AFC’, the noun phrase. Hence ‘AFC Sudbury’ is an example of postmodification, a syntax characteristic of ‘continental’ languages.
Why then should the Boards of Directors or owners of such, to be frank, humble and lowly football clubs (with perhaps the exception of Bournemouth, if I’m being charitable, as they are doing quite well these days) decide to encumber their names with this unusual and egregious styling? It seems to me that it’s to give them some sort of shine hardly merited by their frequently woeful matchday performances, and their position at no. 108 in the Football League, or whatever it might be. Which clubs have they copied this style from? We have to look to continental Europe for the answer. FC Barcelona, AC Milan (Associazione Calcio), Club Brugge, AFC Ajax, FC Porto; the list goes on. All Champions League sides, but there will be humbler clubs than these with the same styling to their names, and after all, why not? It’s the natural syntax of their languages. I don’t imagine for a moment that when the decision in 1971 was taken to rename Bournemouth Football Club ‘AFC Bournemouth’ it was to identify with these equally humble overseas clubs (in fact it appears to have been so that their name would come first in alphabetical lists). Instead, it aped the styling, and soon after, the strip, of AC Milan. ‘The Cherries’ had become the cherry pickers.
Now, other rhetorical figures come into consideration. ‘AFC’, with its echoes of the continental footballing greats, sits uneasily with a name like Bournemouth. I have to say here that I’ve got nothing against the town, in fact I have a great love and affinity for it, being where my grandparents lived and where I spent many happy childhood holidays. Southern Region steam locomotives, yellow trolleybuses and pine-wafted beaches are part of my psychic bedrock. But really . . . in ‘AFC Bournemouth’ we have an example of ‘bathos’, the unexpected paring of an elevated and a lowly idea. The rhetorical spark is generated by this very difference, with ironic or pathetic effect. In the case in point, I think the unintended result is comic irony, so undercutting the intended purpose of a claim to high footballing status and grandeur. It might be aspirational, but the gap between this and reality (AFC Sudbury?) makes it all the more ludicrous. All the more Hyacinth Bucket-ish.
100% Proof will continue to serve up more examples from the battier corners of the contemporary logoshpere, if you’ll kindly allow that spheres can have corners for the purposes of present illustration; so if you haven’t already, please sign up to receive notifications. Let’s then all try to choose our words carefully; after all, if not quite in the style of Hyacinth Bucket, we must keep up appearances.