I’m spending an almost uninterrupted month on the road this February. I’ve just come from London to Seattle, after which I’ll be in Reston, VA.
With all this moving about naturally comes a whole lot of air travel. I’ve started to notice what has become, to me at least, a disturbing pattern in the speech of the employees of the airline industry. I’ve been interested in the way speech evolves in tight social groups for a while now, so this is awakening the armchair linguist in me.
If you’ve done much air travel, the sound of this may be familiar to you:
“Welcome to Seattle, Washington. The current time is 7:05PM. We do hope you had an enjoyable flight with us and that if you do have airline needs in the future that you do choose **Air again. We do know that you have a choice when choosing an airline, and we do thank you for your business. Do be careful when opening the overhead compartments as contents do shift during travel and do sometimes fall on the heads of unsuspecting passengers. We do hope you do have a nice day.”
(Emphasis NOT mine).
It’s as if the airlines have evolved their own little English, which favors the verb “do”. It seems that, somehow, the airline employees have been taught that inefficient over-use of the word “do” makes for more “official” sounding language.
Or maybe there’s actually a game being played by the pilots and flight attendants. Every time you say “do” you get a point. You collect them like air miles and get awarded “elite”, “silver”, “gold”, or “platinum” flight attendant status at the end of the year, which you can cash in for the right to serve the first class cabins instead of having to deal with us riff-raff back in coach.
Maybe it’s not an accident at all. Maybe some brilliant scientist somewhere has determined that using speech like this helps people who don’t speak English as their native language. I hope that’s not the case, though. It’s more fun to think of it as an accident. Given the fact that it happens even in the more casual speech of the pilots, in between talking about how we’ll enjoy the weather on the ground in Cancun and filling us in on the latest football scores, I’d bet it’s not intentional.
Can you think of any other industry groups (other than us IT people) who have evolved their own language quirks?
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February 12th, 2007 at 05:02 PM
HR people let their language seep into their daily lives, I bet. “Do you have, among your children, a resource who could come round and clean my windows, Mrs jones?”
Political pollsters and pundits often sound like horse racing enthusiasts, when they call an up-and-coming candidate ‘good-looking’, even when the candidate looks like the front or back elevation of a horse.
I think the ‘do’ thing is just a noise word, spinning out the announcement so they can make you hear the words ‘enjoyable flight’. I suppose they also think it communicates inclusiveness, togetherness etc., when in reality it has boiled down to an annoying localised linguistic tick.
February 13th, 2007 at 12:39 AM
I think a lot of places do this. In churches, when people pray, you’ll often hear the word “just” sprinkled throughout. “Lord, we just ask that you…and we just want to raise up…and we’re just so glad…”
I’m not really sure if it’s conscious, or if it’s sort of like how the choice of colors impacts the way you perceive something. If it’s bright and colorful, it seems happier, and if it’s black and dark red, it seems more ominous (even if its an ad for a children’s toy). Perhaps the color of the words are intended to have some sort of effect (“do” = happier, inclusive; “just” = humble, in awe).
People are weird.
February 13th, 2007 at 02:25 AM
I’ve always loved the overuser/misuse of “myself” by airline staff as well as the 57 different ways they can make a single boarding call but make it sound urgent: “this is the first and final”; “urgent and final…”
February 13th, 2007 at 06:11 PM
I have a pet peeve of airline speak – over the PA, they will announce things like, “This will serve as the final boarding call for flight 997 to Pittsburgh”... It is as if that isn’t actually the final boarding call, but it will serve as one.
February 15th, 2007 at 02:07 PM
I think “do” and “just” serve to amplify the tone of the speaker, to add general emphasis to the sentiment of the sentence. It’s like the verbal version of the touch on the shoulder people sometimes give you to emphasize what they’re saying. Of course, such contact is not always welcome…. My dim memory of some classes I took recalls the word “doch” serving much the same emphatic role in German, and that leads me to a wildly undersupported conjecture that such emphasis words might be part of how humans use language.
For jargon, especially bureaucratic jargon, it’s hard to beat education, which my mother and my wife work in. During the recent ice storm in the DC area, the radio has been full of statements of county schools being closed and under “code blue level 2 with liberal leave policy.”
February 20th, 2007 at 01:24 PM
I’ve always thought of this “do” thing as part of SWOD (Small Word Over-emphasis Disorder), and it seems (I almost said does seem) to be an epidemic. You hear things on the radio like: “Motorists are advised to be careful on the George Washington Bridge. Police are on the scene of a serious accident….”
Airline language is definitely weird and hilarious. “The use of portable electronic devices may now be used” is a perennial favorite (and a demi-entendre).
David
March 11th, 2007 at 02:38 AM
Sir,