As I was driving into work, my musical enjoyment was interrupted, as it occasionally is, by a completely irrelevant travel report. Now, as we all now, travel reports, when they bother with them, are either about a 20-mile jam on the motorway you’ve just joined, or a problem that has now cleared on a motorway 100 miles away from where you are at the time. Or both. But that’s by-the-by.
The real point of interest in this report was that it was apparently all for me. Apparently, my progress was going to be easier, because my slip road off the motorway had cleared. As you can imagine, this was a blessed relief to me, even though I wasn’t planning on using my slip road today, because, well, I don’t need to go into it, surely, do I? I mean there’s nothing worse than having your slip road and then seeing other people use it, is there. I mean really.
I don’t know where this deep personalisation of reporting has come from, or when the shift from telling me that “the slip road is now clear” to the reporter saying “your slip road is now clear” began, but I can’t be the only one who finds it at best irritating, and at worst confounding: train announcements now talk about “your next station stop”, as if it somehow belongs to all the passengers. Quite apart from the fact that as a passenger I only really care about stops at stations (I don’t recall ever hearing an announcement about my next “signal stop” or next “random unscheduled stop 100 yards outside the station”), in what sense is it mine? It only comes close to being correct when the station in question is where I will be leaving the train, in which case it’s still nonsense for all the passengers who will be left on the train as it departs. Unless “your next station stop is the final destination” of course, but let’s not get started on that one just yet, shall we?
I can vaguely remember not noticing this phenomenon until a few years ago, when I was watching QVC. There seemed to be then, and still is, a style guideline for that channel that tells presenters to always use the word “your” whenever possible. I imagine the theory behind it is to personalise the broadcast. If, as a presenter, you can reach out into someone’s home by referring to them directly, perhaps they’ll like you more, and vicariously like whatever tat you’re flogging at the time. And then perhaps they’ll buy more of it.
Perhaps it’s just as well that I don’t watch a lot of QVC these days (not that I ever did, mind) because it really, really, really annoys me. “You’ve got your on/off switch here, your battery compartment here, and of course you’ve got your memory card in here”. No, no, no, I don’t have any of those things. I just don’t. On my camera, yes, I have those things, all of them, and I suppose they’re mine as a property they inherit from being a part of the camera, a larger object that I do own, but I don’t have the ones on the camera you’re holding, any more than you own the corresponding parts of my camera. They’re just not mine. They’re not even yours! “I’ve got my on/off switch here, my battery compartment here”… you wouldn’t dream of selling it like that. Or how about “my dog’s got his on/off switch here, his battery compartment here”… No. That just won’t do either.
On the other hand, if I do have my on/off switch there and so on, does that mean I can phone QVC sometime and ask for my camera back?
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