Writing Life

The popular NBC sitcom “The Office” chronicles the working lives of the people employed at the Scranton, Pennsylvania, branch of a fictional paper company known as Dunder Mifflin, Inc. The show gets a lot of things right about the contemporary American workplace. In particular it does a good job of demonstrating how people who are confined to an insular setting such as an office for 40 hours a week often end up creating a unique lexicon of work-inspired words and phrases. In the opening scene of tonight’s episode, office suck-up Andy Bernard (actor Ed Helms) was scolded by his boss Michael Scott (Steve Carell) for talking like a baby. The baby talk is driving Andy’s co-worker’s crazy. They are especially annoyed by the way he replaces his Rs with Ws, so that, for instance, “Rhode Island” sounds like “Whode Island.” An unrepentant Andy, channeling Elmer Fudd, tells Michael, “I’m sowwy.” He then points out that Michael’s frequent lapses into Elvis-speak are as annoying to the employees as Andy’s own Elmer-speak. This type of hyper attention to the way ordinary Americans use language is a hallmark of the program.
In an episode from the show’s third season entitled “Traveling Salesmen/The Return,” Andy tells Michael, “I’m sorry, I really schruted it” after blowing a sales call with a valued client. When Michael asks the meaning of the term “schruted it,” Andy tells him, “It’s just this thing people say around your office all the time. When you screw something up in a really irreversible way, you ‘schruted it.’” Andy, who at that time was a newcomer to the Scranton branch, was being disingenuous. He made the phrase up on the spot in an effort to use his own failure as an opportunity to denigrate his office nemesis, Dwight Schrute, Dunder Mifflin’s top salesman in Scranton. To make sure Michael gets the point, Andy adds, “I don’t know where it comes from, though. Do you think it comes from Dwight Schrute?” To which Michael, who is more than a bit obtuse, responds, “Who knows how words are formed?”
Clearly the writers of “The Office” know how words are formed in the contemporary workplace. I worked, off and on, for decades in various northern California offices, mostly in the title-insurance and escrow industries, during which time I picked up dozens of examples of workplace-specific slang. Many of those slang words derived, like “schruting it,” from the names of my co-workers. For instance, I once had a co-worker whose last name was Plapp. To avoid work, he spent an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom. As a result, whenever a co-worker or I felt like hiding out in the bathroom for a while, we’d tell the receptionist, “Hold my calls. I’m going to take a Plapp.” The term actually outlasted the man responsible for its invention. We continued using it long after Plapp had moved on. Newcomers to the company, if they gave any thought at all to the word’s origins, probably assumed it was onomatopoeic rather than an eponym.
Dwight Schrute (played by Rainn Wilson) is the butt of a lot of humor in “The Office.” And “schruting it” isn’t the only phrase his name inspires in the Dunder Mifflin lexicon. His co-workers Jim Halpert (another salesman, portrayed by John Krasinski) and receptionist Pam Beesley (Jenna Fischer) have invented a game wherein they attempt to throw objects into Dwight’s coffee mug when he is away from his desk. Pam dubs the game “Skeet Schruting.”
Pam and Jim are Dunder Mifflin’s best word-coiners. According to Michael, “They have their own little language – like twins.” In an episode entitled “Women’s Appreciation,” Dwight threatens Jim with various legitimate corporate punitive measures: a demerit, a citation, a written warning, a disciplinary review. Jim trumps these by threatening Dwight with a “full desajulation” if he keeps up his harassment. Unfamiliar with the term but terrified by the sound of it, Dwight ceases and desists his threats immediately. In “Health Care,” Jim and Pam confound Dwight’s efforts to find a new company health-care provider by making up various fake ailments and writing them down on their personal health-status reports: Count Choculitis, hot dog fingers, inverted penis, government-created killer nano-robot infection, and so forth. At one point Pam tells Jim, “So, like, let’s say that my teeth turn to liquid and then they drip down the back of my throat. What would you call that?” To which Jim responds: “I thought you said you were inventing diseases. That’s spontaneous dental hydroplosion.” In another episode we learn that Jim and Pam have a special word for “when you’ve got something in your shoe,” although, disappointingly, they never reveal what it is.
In the episode entitled “Business School,” Pam coins the word “braggy,” an adjective meaning boastful. In “Office Olympics,” urged by Jim to come up with a word for a sport he has just invented (racing the length of the conference room with a 20-lbs box of copier paper strapped to each foot), Pam says that Jim is referring to the famous Icelandic pastime known as “flonkerton.” In “The Coup,” Jim refers to a time that he and Pam hummed the same high-pitched note all day long in an effort to get Dwight to make an appointment with an ear doctor. Pam dubs Dwight’s imaginary ear problem “pretendinitis.” That particular incident struck a chord with me. I once worked with a guy named Jimmy who claimed to have a severe hearing impairment, although some days it seemed more severe than others. He used this disability to get out of a lot of work. If he didn’t like the sound of a particular work request, he simply pretended not to hear it. Amazingly, though, whenever he put an item of food (a mug of coffee, popcorn, a Lean Cuisine) into the microwave and then walked out of the break room while it cooked, he would always hear the faint dinging sound that indicated that his meal was ready and instantly return to the break room to retrieve it from the oven. My co-workers and I thought, for the sake of appearances, Jimmy ought to check his watch before going back to retrieve his food, or at least wait ten or twenty seconds after the bell had rung. But, no, Jimmy could hear the microwave bell from anywhere in the office, and he responded to it instantly. Likewise, if someone announced, “Doughnuts in the break room!” Jimmy would always be the first one to respond to the call. A co-worker of mine dubbed this special power of Jimmy’s Food-Related Extra-Auditory Perception, or “freap,” for short. This inspired such comments as, “There’s birthday cake in the break room. Hurry up before Jimmy freaps us out of it.” Jimmy of course, pretended never to hear these comments and claimed ignorance when we asked him about his freaping abilities.
In my experience, the invention of new words is not the only lexical phenomenon associated with the contemporary workplace. Catchphrases are a major component of office life. I once worked with a man whose name, because it sounds like an anatomical problem, remains etched in my memory: Dick Knott. He was a warm-hearted and good-humored fellow who had been in the title-insurance business for a long time. Dick’s catchphrase was a line he uttered every afternoon, near the end of the workday, just before we title examiners started to put away our work and shut down the photocopiers and microfiche readers. Somewhere around 4:45 or 4:50 p.m. Dick would lean back in his chair, stretch his arms out behind him, and say, “Well, it’s time to round up the dogs and piss on the fire,” and like sheep responding to the whistle of their shepherd, the rest of us would prepare to shut down the office for the night. Dick had us well trained; no one ever switched off a microfiche reader or got out his car keys until the phrase was spoken.
Michael Scott’s catchphrase on “The Office” isn’t nearly as clever. He uses the tired old cliché “That’s what she said,” whenever an employee complains about something being “long” or “hard” or makes some innocuous comment such as, “I’ll keep on top of it.” But this too is an example of how well the writers of “The Office” know their milieu. “That’s what she said” was ubiquitous in the American office place of the 1980s, which is when Michael Scott would have first entered the workforce. And thanks to “The Office,” the phrase is enjoying a resurgence of popularity these days. At least it is in my house. I can’t tell my wife, “I’d like another roll, if you don’t mind,” without her responding, “That’s what she said.”
“The Office,” quite obviously, is scripted by word lovers. Characters in the show have discussed the differences between such word pairs as imply/infer and who/whom. Three of the characters have formed a Finer Things Club, which meets in the break room to discuss the works of E. M. Forster and other literary topics. Salesman Stanley Hudson (Leslie David Baker) is a crossword-puzzle addict who carries his puzzles with him everywhere he goes, even into important office meetings (a source of some friction between him and Michael). Darryl Philbin (Craig Robinson), the African-American supervisor of Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton warehouse, takes great delight in teaching Michael “black” words and phrases that no person – black, white or otherwise – has ever before employed. Even Andy Bernard, though less than bright, understands that there is power in words. To get ahead in the business world he frequently attempts to ingratiate himself with customers and coworkers by imitating their speech patterns, repeating their words back at them, and mentioning their names as often as possible. Unfortunately, his smarminess and pomposity usually undermine these efforts.
The writers of the office understand that even the most carelessly coined workplace nicknames can sometimes stick forever. Andy, for instance, always refers to Jim as ‘Big Tuna,’ simply because Jim ate a tuna sandwich for lunch on the day the two first met. Early in his meteoric rise from temp to upper management, Ryan Howard (B. J. Novak) expresses his fear of being labeled with a stupid nickname. “I don’t want to be, like, a guy here, you know? Like Stanley is the ‘Crossword Puzzle Guy’…I don’t want to be the ‘Something Guy.’” Alas, shortly after expressing this sentiment, he starts a fire in the office and is thereafter referred to by co-worker Kevin Malone as “Fire Guy” (a practice Ryan nips in the bud when he later becomes Kevin’s boss).
When the characters aren’t inventing new words like “flonkerton” and “pretendinitis,” they sometimes use old ones in unusual ways. For instance, when Jim mutters the word “birdcage” he is giving Pam a secret signal that he wants her to ring his extension so that he can break off a conversation with a boring coworker. For Michael and his girlfriend Jan (Melora Hardin), “foliage” is a code word meaning “I don’t want to have sex right now.” Andy’s favorite expression in college was “Beer me,” meaning, “Give me a beer.” As a result, he now uses “beer” as an all-purpose substitute for “give,” as in “Beer me that water bottle” or “Beer me that briefcase.” Faced with the prospect of spending an entire day making sales calls with Andy, Jim looks to the heavens and pleads, “Lord, beer me strength.” Michael’s garbled pronunciations of words like “epiphany” and “conundrum” are a regular source of amusement. Puns, Pig Latin, and stupid mnemonic tricks have been employed for comic effect by various characters. And then of course there are the witty near-epigrammatic lines the characters recite, such as Dwight’s self-defense motto: “The eyes are the groin of the head.” Or Michael’s observations on management: “I don’t want somebody sucking up to me because they think I am going to help their career. I want them sucking up to me because they genuinely love me.” And, “A good boss gruntles the disgruntled.”
If the characters on The Office seem inordinately interested in words, it may be because so many of them are portrayed by writers. Series regulars Steve Carell, B. J. Novak, Mindy Kaling, and Paul Lieberstein have all scripted multiple episodes of the show. In her pre-Office days Jenna Fischer wrote and directed the independent film LolliLove. John Krasinski wrote and directed the film Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, which is based on a book by David Foster Wallace. Producer Michael Schur has not only scripted numerous episodes of The Office, he also portrays Dwight’s oddball cousin Mose Schrute, who, ironically, almost never uses words. He is a near mute who dashes across the screen every now and then like a silent movie character who has accidentally wandered into a talkie.
Despite all the interest they take in words, the characters in The Office have tremendous difficulty communicating with one another, and are often unaware of the effects their words have on other people. Michael thinks he is ingratiating himself with his black employees by imitating the racially-charged routines of African-American stand-up comedian Chris Rock, but naturally his efforts backfire. Likewise, when he tries to express support for a coworker who is gay, or Mexican, or Indian, or overweight, he usually ends up being merely offensive. Michael is a notoriously horrible communicator. In “Booze Cruise,” he causes panic among the passengers of a pleasure boat while delivering what he believes to be a motivational speech. Confused by his words, several passengers bolt for the life jackets and one actually jumps overboard. His maladroit tongue is especially troublesome when he is called upon to give a deposition in a lawsuit against Dunder Mifflin. Surrounded by lawyers who are accustomed to using words with precision, Michael finds himself seriously out of his element. At one point he responds to a question by saying, “The timing was nothing short of predominant.”
But Michael isn’t the only poor communicator in The Office. Accountant Kevin Malone’s speech (as rendered by actor Brian Baumgartner) is so slow and immature (his favorite word is “awesome”) that a Dunder Mifflin human resources representative erroneously assumes that he was hired under some sort of affirmative action program for the developmentally disabled. Even Pam and Jim, two of the most articulate employees of Dunder Mifflin, have trouble communicating with one another. Not until the end of season two was Jim finally able to express the love he had long nurtured for Pam (who, at that time, was just weeks away from marrying another man). Even after calling off her wedding, Pam could not muster the nerve to express her own feelings for Jim until the end of the following season (by which time he is dating someone else).
The writers of The Office understand that the words we suppress are often just as important as the words we express. The show is a so-called “mockumentary,” a fake documentary in which the characters frequently talk directly to the camera in answer to questions posed by an unseen filmmaker (the questions themselves are never audible to the viewer). When answering questions during these so-called “talking head” segments, the characters are often torn between their desire to tell the truth about Dunder Mifflin and their desire to remain employed there. Pam, a lowly receptionist, can’t afford to be too candid in her talking-head segments. This was especially true in the early years of the program, when Pam was a less self-assertive character than she is today. As Jenna Fisher explained to interviewer Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air program, “Pam is really stuck. She’s a subordinate in this office. The only way she can express herself is in the silences. But you can say so much without saying anything.” According to Fischer, the comedy in Pam’s early talking-head segments derived “from watching me think about what I wasn’t going to say.” And it isn’t just in the talking-head sequences that the creators of The Office have sometimes forced viewers to guess at the substance of undisclosed words. In an episode called “Christmas Party” Jim draws Pam’s name in the annual Secret Santa gift exchange. He buys her a teapot and then hides a letter to her inside the box because, “Christmas is the time to tell people how you feel.” Unfortunately, Michael decides at the last minute to convert the Secret Santa ritual into a so-called “White Elephant” exchange, which allows the employees to steal gifts from each other. As a result, the teapot falls into Dwight’s possession. When Pam learns that Jim intended the teapot for her, she trades Dwight a $400 iPod for it. But by this time Jim has lost his nerve. He removes the letter from the box while Pam is admiring her teapot. Neither Pam nor the viewer ever learns the contents of the letter. The following season, during an emotionally difficult time for her, Pam sends what appears to be a heartfelt text message to Jim. But Jim, who has stayed late at the office to work and drink excessively with a couple of coworkers, is passed-out at his desk when the text arrives. He never sees it and the viewer never learns its contents. In another episode, Dunder Mifflin’s female employees are much amused by some comments about Michael that Pam, anonymously, has written on the ladies’ room wall. Neither the men in the office, nor the viewers, ever learn what Pam wrote.
Paradoxically, the writers of The Office are often at their best when using words to express the limitations of language as a communication tool. Dwight’s inability to articulate the pain he feels when his office romance with accountant Angela Martin (Angela Kinsey) goes sour is the source of some poignant scenes in season four. Twice Jim encounters Dwight moaning in sorrow. But because Dwight refuses to reveal the source of his agony (the romance is supposed to be a secret), Jim, who knows exactly why Dwight is suffering, can offer nothing but generalities and bromides to his anguished colleague. Words fail him.
When Dwight wants to hurt Andy, he activates an imaginary cone of silence that renders Andy’s words inaudible to him. By reciting the words “unshun” and “reshun” Dwight controls the imaginary device, turning it off (“unshun”) when he feels like communicating with Andy, and reactivating it (“reshun”) when he wants to tune him out. Though rooted in an actual English word, “unshun” and “reshun” cannot be found in any mainstream dictionary. But, like “flonkerton” and “pretendinitis,” they are examples of the types of imaginative coinages that are born every day in workplaces all across America.
The employees at Dunder Mifflin know all there is to know about the value of blank paper. The writers of “The Office” know how words can render that paper priceless.