My Lift Your Language feature might once have been called ‘Elevate Your Language’ … but now? Not on your life.
I suppose ‘elevate’ was an extension of ‘take it to the next level’ (but aren’t we all tired of that one, too?)
Obviously it can work in some circumstances. The main problem is that, like many other ‘battered ornaments’, this clichéd buzzword appears everywhere and is mostly used uncritically.
A few particularly silly examples I read recently:
Elevate your living space (add a mezzanine, perhaps?)
Elevate your staff development (send them to a mountain retreat?)
Elevate your summer dresses (reveal rather more than you intended?)
You get the idea.
The solution
There are dozens of alternatives to the imperative Elevate your (insert just about anything and everything here).
The simple solution really is simple: say what you mean.
Depending on what, precisely, you want to say, some quick fixes (replacements) might be:
Improve / enhance
Transform / reimagine
Revitalise / re-energise
Renovate / refresh / renew
One confused writer produced this sentence:
I came away from the session feeling totally elevated.
I don’t know what kind of ‘session’ it was (maybe she left on a ‘high’) but the context told me the word she was probably looking for was ‘elated’. Or perhaps not….
All this started me thinking about other words related to lift or raise. Then I thought of ….
But no, that would be ridiculous. One quick ‘Google’ later, though, and there it was:
Are you looking to ascend your business to the next level?
In just one sentence: a clumsy continuous present tense (‘Are … looking’); a buzzword used wrongly as a transitive verb (‘ascend’ doesn’t take an object); and a cliché. Three strikes. Out!
Challenge: How would you fix it?
I can’t finish without quoting the most absurd example I’ve seen. It was in a flyer designed to market an online course:
Elevate Your Deep Learning
Are we headed up? Down? It sounds remarkably like a call to undo the good you might have been doing. Maybe it’s about making something ‘deeply, deeply superficial’.
Whatever the case, it’s confusing and lazy language.
Unless there’s a sneaky trick I’m missing.
Message: Clarity in communication is everything.