The European Electronic Toll Service might just have another string to its bow...

I was once given a very memorable example of the correct way to include the word “utilise” in a sentence by, somewhat surprisingly, my doctor. We were discussing falling standards in written and spoken English and I said the one of my bugbears was the mis-use of “utilise”. “I’ve got the perfect example,” he said. “It came to me this morning when I had a patient who kept getting ear infections and we eventually worked out why.” This wasn’t how I had expected my appointment to pan out but, like a cheap sausage, I was all ears. “It turned out he’d been... this is unpleasant... regularly cleaning his ears with his car key. Hence the ear infections but that’s a great definition: you use your car key to start the engine, you utilise it to clean your ears.”

“Some of the thinking that went into those reworkings and retrofittings just blew our minds”

It’s not the most savoury of anecdotes, admittedly, but it leads me nicely into a brief discussion about things that are used for purposes other than for which they are designed. I remember a client meeting about six or seven years ago where the innovation director was telling me that about a third of all innovative upgrades to their existing product range came about as a result of customers “utilising” a product or modifying it, telling the company what they’d done (and how they’d done it) and that it had the desired effect and then, where possible, that new version becoming an actual item in their product range. It wasn’t actively encouraged but if it works, it works, was the thinking behind that.