The word ‘robust’

Business words come and business words go, but ‘robust’ looks like it’s intent on staying. As one of the most pernicious signs of pale, pasty, nondescript English that you’re likely to see, robust can be found in public statements and marketing bumph everywhere from food to finance.

Bogus buzzwords and phrases like ‘think outside the box’ and ‘step change’ ring alarm bells the instant they’re heard. ‘Robust’ has been sneaking past people’s better sensibilities for years, and can now be found almost everywhere – and used to describe almost anything – and it is spreading. It’s a viral killer of meaning, much like it’s distant cousin, ‘solutions’.

Tesco now stocks ‘Indian Meal Solutions’ – not curries, but solutions for anyone experiencing a shortage of Indian meals. Unfortunately for Tesco, very few people have a problematic deficiency of Indian Meals, and are assuming they’re referring to microwave chicken balti – which is handy, because they are. The people who decide such things, labels for shelves, have picked a side, the side of bollocks-talk.

Grammar Nazis have been napping on the job when it comes to defending the English language. It’s simple to be a literal fascist of words when it comes to commas, semicolons, colons, capital letters, possessive apostrophes and spelling. They simply treat English like it was mathematics, making sure that all the squiggles and letters line up in a perfectly logical framework, creating a perfectly uniform word-frame only to fill it with literary catshit like ‘step change’, ‘thought leaders’ and ‘holistic governance’.

Robust packaging, robust policies, a robust policy framework, a robust flavour, a robust vehicle, robust action on poverty, a robust response to the ‘downturn’. In use, the word might once have served to reassure, but now, thanks to its overuse it’s a signpost for the farting classes that the speaker wants to get across a positive, reassuring message without actually stooping to explain themselves.

When used in political terms it’s a way of particularly nondescript. If a politician had ‘robust’ discussions with a foreign counterpart, it’s just a guarantee that some talking went on. Your politician is probably more concerned that he got his mileage allowance for that particular junket. Where once a meeting could have been described as deadlocked or unproductive, now robust discussions can have taken place. “Yes, we discussed it. No, we didn’t achieve anything.”

Of course you can’t, and shouldn’t, outlaw words. And this article is not in any way an assassination attempt on what is a perfectly acceptable term. The problem with ‘robust’ is it’s ubiquity, and it’s over-adoption by lazy press officers and politicians the universe over.

As a correspondent in the American Journal of Hematology correctly points out, it is possible to make a robust point without using the word ^‘robust:

“Literary standards such as the complete works of Shakespeare (37 plays and 154 sonnets), the King James Bible, and Bulfinch’s mythology do not use the word ‘robust’ even once. Despite plenty of robust structures in the human body, there is only a single ^‘robust’ descriptor buried in the 1396 pages of Henry Gray’s anatomical classic. Bartlett’s Quotations does not contain one aphorism with the word ‘robust,’ proving that witty and clever sayings can exist in a robust-less world.”

According to George Orwell’s Principles of Newspeak, “Newspeak was designed not to extend, but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.” Robust business words like ‘robust’ are not Newspeak yet, but give them time to bed in fully and replace the plethora of actual adjectives that could have been used and they will be. The people who use them will realise they never have to truly describe things ever again, never have to tell you what’s what. Then you’re fucked.

Ref: http://bloodjournal.hematologylibrary.org/cgi/content/full/103/2/746