Tuesday, July 05, 2022

Halifax Bank—bunch of morons

Have you been following the problem with Halifax Bank in England? The bank began a program of issuing employee name tags that also included pronouns "to avoid misgendering." Regular folks complained, and some staffer named "AndyM," presumably in charge of Halifax's Twitter account, snottily tweeted that people who didn't appreciate the new name tags were free to close their accounts and find another bank.


AndyM obviously needs some grammar lessons in proper parallelism.*

Anyway, "close your account" is precisely what a whole host of customers did, costing Halifax Bank millions of dollars. Some are calling this one of the biggest PR disasters in British history. In the video below, Paul Joseph Watson wryly notes that Halifax Bank is, bizarrely, doubling down on its PC position. The bank obviously fears the woke mob, but not the majority. Stupid. But, hey—at least ideology is more important than money for these apes.

Disney goes woke and loses business. Netflix goes woke and loses business. Does no one ever learn, or are these corporate CEO fuckheads all so rich that they simply don't care how much money their companies lose?

__________

*Parallelism has to do with using grammatically similar structures in an elegant way. AndyM's attempt at parallelism was pretty clumsy.

WRONG: We strive for inclusion, equality and quite simply, in doing what's right.

So poor Andy is trying to say We strive for A, B, and C. Note, first, that—like many Brits—Andy neglects to use an Oxford comma. True, such commas are considered optional by many experts, but I believe, along with many curmudgeons, that the Oxford comma provides clarity. Compare I'd like to thank my parents, God and Satan (i.e., God and Satan are your parents) to I'd like to thank my parents, God, and Satan (i.e., you're thanking [1] your parents, [2] God, and [3] Satan). See the difference? The Oxford comma is the comma that ought to appear right before the "and" that signifies the last item in your list:

For our camping trip, I brought some food, some Band-aids, and a dildo.

The red comma in the above sentence is the Oxford comma (also called a serial comma).

The next problem—the one that really caught my eye—was that Andy failed in his parallelism. He's trying to say the following: We strive for [noun], [noun], and quite simply, [noun]. Not only does Andy not end with a noun—he introduces a superfluous preposition, thus making himself look illiterate. Why is that "in" there? Does it makes sense to say "We strive for in doing what's right"? No. 

The easy way to save Andy (who really doesn't deserve to be saved, given his snotty attitude toward customers) is to keep the word doing, which is a gerund functioning as a noun, while chucking out the "in," which makes the whole thing into an incongruous prepositional phrase.

RIGHT (1): We strive for inclusion, equality, and quite simply, doing what's right.

This still feels a bit stilted to me, though, so let's see if we can't make the parallelism a bit more, well, parallel.

RIGHT (2): We strive for inclusion, equality, and quite simply, ethicality.

While that's a hell of a lot better in terms of parallelism, ethicality may itself be too stilted for some people. Perhaps we should settle for:

RIGHT (3): We strive for inclusion, equality, and quite simply, ethical behavior.

Personally, I prefer ethicality because ethical behavior is a noun phrase, not just a simple noun. But ethical behavior is shorthand for doing what's right, so it might work.

But what do you think? Let me know in the comments.



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