Corporate speak and how it's ruining communication.

Today I was travelling to a rehearsal in South London and so I had to change tubes at Euston. As I left the Northern Line platform I heard the member of staff who was standing on the platform say into the PA:

"Passengers are asked to move down the platform".

This struck me as a completely absurd thing to say. Quite apart from the fact that the people in question were not passengers, because they weren't on the train yet, why on earth would anyone talking to a group of people he could see and who could, if they tried, see him, address them in the third person and use the passive voice? Have you ever heard a child say to his mother "my parent is asked to give me a glass of milk", for instance? Would a teacher ever say to his class, "my class are asked to begin exercise four"? Of course not, because that would be bizarre. The use of the third person and the passive voice, both of which distance the speaker from the addressee, has the effect of taking a perfectly clear, simple request and making it hard to understand. And making the speaker sound like an automaton.

This is not the only example I've come across of modern English becoming less clear and more confusing. Here are some others:

A telesales person: "Do you have any identity theft insurance at all?"

What is this "at all" for? It serves no purpose and actually detracts from the clarity of the sentence.

Person from my mobile phone network provider on the phone: "Is there anything else I can do for yourself?".

Why "yourself"? This is a reflexive pronoun, like "myself". I can feed myself, but you can't do anything for myself. Only I can do things for or to myself. It has NO other purpose, and I wish people would stop using it like this. A more common misusage: "If you would like to join Paul, Sarah and myself on this trip..." Is it not painfully obvious that "me" is more appropriate and sounds better? If not, you've heard the wrong version too many times.

On a train: "We will shortly be arriving into our next station stop, which will be..."

Where do I start? "Arriving into"? "Station stop"? Or the fact that thirteen words are used here when six at most would do. "We will shortly be arriving at..." would have done exactly the same job.

This is not only about my linguistic snobbery, though that obvously has a part to play. It's also about clarity of communication, and there's nothing snobbish about that. If someone moves to this country, or even is just visiting from abroad, and English is not their first language, they don't need to be bombarded with superfluous syllables. Clarity is important. Whether through concern for foreigners, or care for the proper use of our language, we need to recapture it.