Mind your language

`WHAT'S so marvellous about Norwich?' my husband asked, grabbing the whisky bottle with a dexterity surprising in one of his age and habits.

I had begun an enthusiastic peroration about the cathedral and a good second-hand bookshop in St Giles's Street when I thought to ask, `Why?'

`Well, Tony Blair's going on about Norwich workers,' he replied.

Of course, the cloth-eared idiot had misheard and the Prime Minister had been talking about knowledge workers. I admit that the phrase is hardly a familiar one. Mr Blair also shares with business consultants and computer salesmen an annoying habit of referring to knowledge management as if it were something selfevidently healthy and profitable. After all, primary-school teachers, librarians and Mastermind winners are bulging with knowledge and can manage it like a Derby-winning jockey, but they remain poor, put-upon folk. Indeed knowledge as a commercial commodity is at odds with the satire that used to be directed at universities or polytechnics as knowledge factories, mere plant for the knowledge industry. This pejorative concept seems to have emerged in the 1920s, the decade in which the University of Readin was invented.

But now, when Thames Valley University looms even over Slough, knowledge is not what you have in your brain, but what is tucked away in your computer. A knowledge worker need have little more knowledge than how to drive a search engine. A knowledge manager demands money from companies with the promise that he will tell them how to make more profit from their information technology,.

The BBC meanwhile is offering to digital-television subscribers a whole Knowledge Channel. Such programmes would once have been called factual, educational or documentary. But documentaries have largely become docusoaps of the Paddington Green variety, if you are lucky. And, despite Mr Blair's fondness for reiterating the term, education has acquired a patronising connotation.

Presumably Mr Blair, driven about in motor-cars as part of the government's integrated transport policy, is not given to taking taxis, drivers of which are, in London, inordinately proud of having done the Knowledge. Their intimacy with the streets of the capital bears a parallel to the intimacy which in law courts used, in divorce cases, to be said to have ,occurred'. That was carnal knowledge, a fossilised phrase with which we are all familiar but never, I trust, use.

Copyright Spectator Jul 24, 1999
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