Now you are speaking my language!
Article Type: Literature and insights From: Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Volume 22, Issue 4
Let us get sporty. A recent news report about a baseball game said that one team had closed out the match. It also said that this team took out the match,which is not to say that they went on a date with it, but that they had won it. Curiously, they simultaneously took out the other team, but that is not to imply a happy threesome – it actually means they defeated them. Apparently,should one look at things from the other side, the lesser team on the day did not lose, it went down.
A footballer who commits an infringement now risks fronting a tribunal, which is not to say he will be promoted to an administrative role where he is running it. Instead, fronting the tribunal means facing it, so that he can be called to account for his playing misdemeanour. But the bigger issue is that we cannot really say that someone chairs or otherwise runs a tribunal these days; instead,someone heads up a tribunal. It is much simpler, is not it?
When I watch motorcycle racing, the commentators often describe the person in second place as closing in on the leading rider. Sometimes they might say that he is closing up on the leading rider, or even closing down on him. In on? Up on? Down on? These variations are actually all describing the same event, so what is going, er, on? Perhaps prepositions are naturally gregarious, or they just get lonely and need to hang around other prepositions. Or maybe I have discovered some odd kind of preposition magnetism at work that has not yet noticed by linguistic scholars.
Another example? Here is a non-sporty one. Do you remember that politicians might once have been said to sign a bill? Not any more. These days a politician signs off on a bill. I guess it would sound silly if they signed on off a bill instead, so there is an odd syntactical protocol operating even within such redundant constructions. Prepositions give the illusion of activity and of place. They often indicate direction, location, and movement – simple things that encourage visual understanding. My university, for instance, no longer has an end of year close or closing, but a closedown. It is much more dynamic, is not it? And now I know that we are not closing up, or sideways, or diagonally.
Instead of resisting the intrusion of prepositions, we could surprise everyone embrace their use as if there were no tomorrow. News reporters would be irresistibly attracted to the vivacious nature of accounting and feel compelled to tell the world what is currently happening, especially about papers in this journal. It might even get accounting and auditing activities ranking alongside the football news at last. That is why, in future, I will be writing upall of my upcoming editorials – it will be so much livelier. From now on, it is on and on with in and out, and up and down. Deal?
And so to this issue’s creative contributions. A tougher reality than I have been dealing with above emerges in B.N. Oakman’s poem, “A question of economics”, a meditation on the dominating power of the market and profit. To finish on a lighter note, we have Lee Parker’s “E-mail infatuation”. I am sure you will recognise the frustrations that this poem is built upon.
Please feel free to send in (on, out, up […]) your own creative work to me for this section of the journal.
Steve EvansLiterary Editor
