# Jargon and Football Scouts



## Earion (Dec 23, 2013)

*Steven Poole. Who Touched Base in My Thought Shower?
A treasury of unbearable office jargon*
160pp. Sceptre. £9.99.
ISBN 978-1444-78184-7

Jargon, if used at the correct time around the correct people, can serve as an efficient way to refer to shared knowledge. In the right company, it is probably perfectly acceptable to ask somebody to “draw me up an accountability matrix” or “hold the ring” (meaning to take responsibility of a project). In other situations, however, as Steven Poole rightly argues in _Who Touched Base in My Thought Shower?, _“fluency in the idiom is a kind of cheap competence that often masks a lack of competence in anything that matters”. Office vernacular does the opposite of proper jargon: it maddeningly “complicates simple ideas, deflects blame and obscures problems”. It is a language that has become “viral”, as the abundance of terms in Poole’s treasury demonstrates —and deserves its infamy for being, as the subtitle indicates, “unbearable”. As Poole puts it: “when people hear such buzzwords in the office, they want to stab someone in the eye with a pen”.

Although mostly written in a tongue-in-cheek, colloquial style, this book also succeeds in being informative and enlightening on a vexing subject. Poole provides, where appropriate, interesting historical anecdotes and explores not only the modern usage of words, but their etymological roots, tracing the bureaucratic use of “push the envelope”, “heads up” and “on my radar” to military language, and “deep dive” and “close of play” to sport. Such sources are telling: in Poole’s view, “a lot of office jargon is engineered to jolly its targets along by making the fluorescent-lit days sound more exciting and important”.

The running joke of _Who Touched Base in My Thought Shower? _does start to wear thin eventually, however, and some of the author’s most interesting observations come not in the body of the book, which is mostly made up of jokes, but in the preface’s perceptive account of office jargon and its usage --especially the sinister use of language that dehumanizes workers (download, interface) and absolves management of responsibility (euphemisms for sacking people: demising, resizing). A book based on laughing, even in exasperation, over office jargon in fact sheds light on the purpose and the psychological effect of office language as a whole.

Claire Hazelton


*Michael Calvin. The Nowhere Men*
400pp. Century. £14.99.
ISBN 978-1-78089-107-1

There are few professional writers who would accept £4 for 1,700 words. Fewer still would do so if they had to give up to eight hours of their time for such a paltry return. And yet, as Michael Calvin reveals in _The Nowhere Men, _this kind of financial recompense is common among football’s scouts.

Scouts, the men who travel the country to watch potential recruits and assess them, are football’s hidden tribe. Calvin, an experienced football writer, spent a year shadowing scouts at all levels to shine a light on a calling in which “the ritual of recommendation and rejection was ceaseless”. Scouts are routinely paid expenses of just 40p a mile for their reports on players, possess nothing by way of job security, and, as Calvin explains, are increasingly under threat from technology. Statistical analyses of players have become de rigueur for clubs from the Premier League all the way to those in League Two, with a company such as Scout7—which specializes in “video scouting”—even offering free scouting packages to increase its market penetration.

Written in impressionistic style, through a series of compelling vignettes rather than a linear narrative, _The Nowhere Men _is an elegiac portrait of a breed which may not be dying but which is certainly changing. The book shows scouts to be fuelled by a naive but enduring love for a game which pays scant attention not just to their welfare but to that of the players they discover. Calvin makes telling jabs at the wider dysfunction of football, which will casually disregard a young player without a thought for his welfare and which just as readily dispenses with managers and scouts. Everyone, ultimately, is expendable. But despite the fragility of their existence, the scouts keep scouting. Those such as Terry Murphy (Arsenal), Mel Johnson (Liverpool) and John Griffin (Wycombe Wanderers) embody their passion, proving to be as honourable as they are expert. Ultimately, no amount of number crunching can match the scout’s understanding of all facets of football —and their humanity, too. This is perhaps best illustrated in a beautiful account of the relationship between Murphy and Arsenal’s great midfielder David Rocastle, who died tragically young aged thirty-three. Michael Calvin has produced an excellent, compassionate book.

Alex Wade

TLS November 29, 2013


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