Efficiency Expert


Wherein Our Heroine Shares Something Very Painful.
I was recently on an airplane. It's been a long time since I was on an airplane, though I used to be on one about every week. It reminded me of a few things about passenger life: for instance, passengers always complain about airline food, but they complain even more if it's not forthcoming. It also reminded me of something that used to make my shoulders tense up and my teeth grind together: the absolutely excessive and rampant use of entirely meaningless, superfluous syllables by cabin crew.

The cabin crew of an airplane is terribly fond of this phrase: "Please place all cell phones in the 'off' position." Now I ask you, what in the name of all that's holy does that really mean? First of all, notwithstanding Sprint's sometimes sketchy definition of "service area," there is no "off position" for my phone or any other phone I have ever seen. Moreover, cell phones have buttons, not switches (though a cell phone with a switch somewhere on it might have a retro-cool Lost in Space look to it), so even saying, "Please switch your cell phone off," would be technically incorrect. If you are currently rolling your eyes and saying, "You know what they mean," I ask you to bear with me for another, less grammatically compulsive question: where did this strange, tortured syntax come from?

I have publicly aired this rant before, and some have noted that the phrase in question sounds like, "Please assume crash positions," a time-honored bit of cabin crew script. But how can one phrase hijack an entire profession's use of the English language? When these people go home do they tell their significant others, "In order to achieve minimum negative emotional content from other inhabitors of this household, please place all food preparation utensils in their stowed positions"?

I have to admit that my outrage over this sort of language is not just a function of its grammatical faults, but also that it is an absolute waste of energy to produce and to hear. I not only understand the phrase, "Please turn your cell phones off," (5 fewer syllables), but it also leaves me unmoved. It doesn't make me want to ignore the TSA's warnings, unbuckle my seat belt, get up and inform the offender that their brain is not in the "engaged position."

You can get in trouble for that these days. Or so I have been informed.
Posted: Wednesday - February 11, 2004 at 07:59 AM         | |

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