For a simple plural, definitely no apostrophe; I would go for the Hesses, as in grass / grasses, 'es' being the regular plural after a double s. Then if you wanted to talk about something the family owned you can simply add an apostrophe - the Hesses' house. Compare:

Eliot Ness - "Ness remarried in 1939, to illustrator Evaline Michelow. The Nesses moved to Washington, D.C. in 1942 where he worked for the federal government" (Wikipedia)

Burness - "The Land of the Burnesses" (Burness Genealogy and Family History)

Snodgrass - the Snodgrasses - "The Snodgrasses' El Reno home is covered in angling - from the rods in one living-room corner to the swimming-fish designs on throw pillows that cover the ..." (NewsOK.com)

Hess - "The Hesses . Murten and Wilma Hess of Mapleton celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary Saturday at Evangelical Church." (Google News)

The Hesses - blog of Daren Hess (edehess.blogspot.com)

re: feedback as a noun. I've just noted that Michael Quinion, respected etymologist and contributor to the OED, and author of the excellent website World Wide Words, is quite happy to head the first section of his newsletter 'Feedback, notes and comments'.

The truth is that for many of us 'feedback' is a perfectly normal word (though not when used as a verb, I admit), whose use (attested to from 1955) is not restricted to business and whose meaning can't simply be reduced to 'response'; although 'reaction' is probably closer to the mark. The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines it as:

'advice, criticism or information about how good or useful something or somebody's work is'

@jayles - you're quite right about 'influence' being an early example of a noun (14c.) being turned into a verb (about 1650). No doubt there were a few 'grumpy old men' who complained at the time, but we've had a few hundred years to get used to it.

And if we didn't coin new words and extend existing words' uses, English would be a pretty static language indeed, instead of the wondrous dynamic thing it is. Not all will be to everyone's liking, but with time, no doubt, the chaff will fall to the wayside. Try an Ngram (British books) for that commonr British business cliché of the 80s 'by and large': extend the date to 2008 and you'll see its use has dropped off by about a quarter in the last twenty years or so.

Going by Ngram, it certainly seems to occur more in American writing than in British writing, but there's a huge spike in the forties. Considering its use seems to be so marginal, I'm wondering if this can be put down to one or two writers: Upton Sinclair, who published just about one book a year in the forties, was particularly fond of it.

Just google Ngram Viewer and enter:

he told about:eng_us_2012,He told about:eng_us_2012,he told about:eng_gb_2012,He told about:eng_gb_2012

she told about:eng_us_2012,She told about:eng_us_2012,she told about:eng_gb_2012,She told about:eng_gb_2012

and you'll see what I mean.

@Brus - I agree with you about the hyphenated phrasal verbs, but I would certainly hyphenate 're-enter' due to (!!!) the double 'e', as indeed does my dictionary.

aerothermal - interestingly, OneLook doesn't find either version in any dictionaries, but at Google Books the unhyphenated version vastly predominates, which is hardly surprising - aerodynamic, aerobatic, aeronautical etc.

Your teacher's take on 'due to' is a new one on me (or, on further investigation, turns out to be a very old one). Since the beginning of the twentieth century (and especially as put forward by Fowler), the usual argument has been that 'due to' should clearly modify a specific noun or pronoun or follow a linking verb (e.g. be) - 'the failure to nail currant jelly to a wall is not due to the nail' (Teddy Roosevelt 1915), but not begin a sentence in reference to the whole sentence' - 'Due to the bad weather the match was cancelled', in which case 'owing to' is used. (Technically, 'due to' was seen as an adjective, while 'owing to' is a preposition).

I think (yes, I think; I don't assert - especially as I don't fully understand the intricacies of these people's objections) that these traditionalists probably would prefer something like 'The fact that most of this burns up when it re-enters the atmosphere is due to (attributable to) aerothermal heating'.

But this differentiation is usually considered pretty old hat nowadays. In Practical English Usage, Michael Swan writes ' "Due to"and "owing to" both mean "because of." ... Some people believe it is incorrect to use "due to" at the beginning of a clause in this way, but the structure is common in educated usage'.

Or as Maeve Maddox writes at 'Daily Writing Tips' - 'For most English speakers due to and owing to have become interchangeable. Trying to preserve a distinction between them is pointless.'

At Oxford Dictionaries Online, they go into a bit more detail:

'The use of due to as a prepositional phrase meaning ‘because of,’ as in he had to retire due to an injury first appeared in print in 1897, and traditional grammarians have opposed this prepositional usage for more than a century on the grounds that it is a misuse of the adjectival phrase due to in the sense of ‘attributable to, likely or expected to’ (the train is due to arrive at 11:15), or ‘payable or owed to’ (render unto Caesar what is due to Caesar). Nevertheless, this prepositional usage is now widespread and common in all types of literature and must be regarded as standard English.'

There's no reference about 'due to' only referring to money owed in Fowlers (1st and 3rd editions). But The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage does suggest that in the first edition of his dictionary, Johnson, used 'due to', to refer only to debt. He later changed his mind, however, and said of 'due to' to mean cause - 'proper, but not usual'. But MWDEU does go on to say - 'Somehow Johnson's comments ... were transmitted to American handbooks of the second half of the 19th Century ... . The gist of their argument is objection to the use of "due" where there is no notion of debt'. This idea didn't seem to be carried over much into the 20th century, however, nor does it seem to have taken hold in Britain.

But as they say at MWDEU - 'Concern over the propriety of "due to" is one of those long-lived controversies in which the grounds for objection have entirely changed over time'.

More about 'due to' here: http://caxton1485.wordpress.com/tag/owing-to/

A few (rather long) thoughts about business jargon, business buzzwords and management speak. All areas of life employ jargon to a certain extent: we might talk of *posting* comments to this *forum*, for example, but a pedant might insist that nothing is being put in a post box, so how can we be posting. But of course words change or take on new meanings.

I think we can divide the sort of business words and expressions that annoy (some) people into two categories: those that people find ‘ugly’ or think are being misused, and those that cause confusion, or are used to obfuscate. In the first category I’d put verbing or verbification - two words you might not find in a dictionary, but commonly used to describe the process of turning verbs into nouns - just Google them. These are pretty subjective - I’m not particularly keen on the -is(z)e ones, like prioritise and incentivise, but am not really bothered by verbs like action and access. But I draw the line at nouns that have come from verbs being turned back into verbs again - ‘We’ll decision this tomorrow’ is a step too far, even for me.

Part of the problem here, I think, is the shock of the new. People have been turning nouns into verbs for centuries now - ‘The goods are being shipped tomorrow’, ‘She’s decided to divorce him’, ‘Brazil is hosting the next World Cup’ - but new ones tend to be a bit disconcerting. I can’t really see a logical reason, however, why if you can motivate (motive + ate) staff, you can’t also incentivise (incentive + is(z)e) them. And the meaning is pretty clear.

Much more problematic, I think, are those expressions that are not understood by people not in the know (or as we might say in management-speak - not in the loop). A quick look at four different pages from the web on management-speak, from The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Plain English Campaign and BBC Weekender, shows that ‘blue-sky thinking’ and ‘drill down’ appear in three of them, while ‘low-hanging fruit‘ and ‘push the envelope’ (I can never remember the difference between ‘pushing the envelope’ and ‘thinking outside the box’!) These are typical of the sort of expression I mean. Two years ago I wrote a post about these on my blog, ‘Loop back to me and we’ll touch base about it offline’, in which I said:

‘for many native-speakers, this sort of language can be incomprehensible, sound pretentious or just sound plain ugly. In the UK many employees say they feel cut off from management, as they haven’t a clue what management are talking about.’ - these have also led to the invention of the game Buzzword Bingo.

When teaching, I don’t tend to comment on words like prioritise, as they are pretty well ubiquitous, but when course books include expressions like ‘keep me in the loop’, I give them the same warning I gave in my blog.

I also said, however, that ‘like any other jargon, business-specific jargon can of course be very useful, can even lead to more precision, that otherwise would involve long explanations.’

I’m thinking here about what I would call shorthand words. At The Guardian, Stephen Poole criticises the word stakeholder, which he defines as ‘People in the company who are affected by a certain project; also, sometimes, business partners and customers.’. This is not exactly the way I see it used (and being taught), which is much better reflected by the definition at Investopedia - ‘A party that has an interest in an enterprise or project. The primary stakeholders in a typical corporation are its investors, employees, customers and suppliers. However, modern theory goes beyond this conventional notion to embrace additional stakeholders such as the community, government and trade associations.’ - in other words, in a road building project, the stakeholders include central and local government, who are financing the project, the construction companies and their subcontractors who are building it, the future users of the road, and the people who live in the area affected by the road. That’s OK if you’re going to use it only once, but is a hell of a mouthful if you need to repeat it. Poole then gives two rather extreme examples of it being used in a silly way, ‘Manage our stakeholders’ and ‘Update our stakeholder matrix’, but this is not how I see it being used in the real world.

There is also the concept of ‘stakeholder capitalism’ (as opposed to ‘shareholder capitalism’) which is rather easier to say than ‘All those that have an interest capitalism’.

Another on his list is ‘deliver’, although I can’t see that he really puts forward a reason why (apart from the fact that he doesn’t like it). I know that a lot of people think that this should be reserved for physical delivery, but I don’t really see why. In banking in particular, they see the various services they sell as products and commonly talk of retail banking, and how to deliver the product to the customer (through branches, the internet, via mobile phone etc). This seems to me a simple extension of the original meaning of the word, and pretty harmless.

It does seem to me that very often people don’t really know how the words they criticise are really being used ‘in the wild’. For example, some people think that in its modern use ‘issues’ is just a fancy way of saying ‘problems’. But if you tell me somebody has got issues, it tells me rather more, in my opinion, than simply saying they have problems.

It’s not really so surprising that in the business world so much new language is being coined. To use a (management-speak?) cliché, the only constant in business these days is change. This is exemplified by concepts like Six Sigma and lean production. In knowledge-based industries especially, and in a world where people expect to change jobs avery five years or so, firms have realised that their staff are their greatest asset, so people lower down the line are given much more responsibility than before. This also leads to a new vocabulary to do with reward, challenge and motivation, etc. If we get words like ‘empowerment’ as a result, this is probably a small price to pay.

On more than one occasion, Brus has blamed the use of this sort of language on ‘middle-management’, which stereotyping I find rather distasteful. I teach quite a few students who would qualify as middle-management, and most of them are absolutely charming, and here in Poland, at least, highly educated and intelligent people (many young Polish professionals spend two out of four weekends putting themselves through Master’s degrees).

In fact, reading Lucy Kellaway at the FT, and the example of John Birt at the BBC, would suggest this is more likely to come from certain senior managers. Kellaway has also shown how often the problem is not so much the words that are used, as the way they’re used and the context they’re used in - I remember her taking one CEO to task for writing something like ‘we are passionate about fulfilling our customer’s needs’. No you’re not, she said, you’re passionate about your wife, you’re possibly passionate about your hobby, but no way you’re passionate about your customer needs (or something like that).

Finally it should be remembered that it’s probably not the managers themselves who come up with these words, but more likely management gurus and academics at business schools. Not for nothing is one of the main websites listing these words and expressions called MBA Watch!

http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fbooks%2F2013%2Fapr%2F25%2Ftop-10-worst-management-speak&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNFekkIkX_CMWbhWdSwqbX33ho7F4g

http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Ffinance%2Fjobs%2F10393668%2FOffice-jargon-The-worst-culprits-in-management-speak.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNH8Lc12FgNI_5M67kUjeGgHl6IiHg

@Brus - The problem with commissioning purposes - ‘it lacks the word which says what the commissioning is of’ - I think that what is being commissioned is pretty obvious to anyone who has followed developments in the British broadcasting world since the start of Channel Four and the opening up of BBC and ITV to independent producers. And the one-word expression ‘commissioning’ is standard in the industry: The BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky all have web pages entitled ‘Commissioning’. In fact, the BBC even refer to theirs as being a separate website.

The publishing industry has had commissioning editors for decades, but I don’t remember any great clamour that these should be called ‘book-commissioning editors’.

And then there’s the plural ‘processes’. On the front page of its website entitled Commissioning, the BBC doesn’t in fact talk about ‘processes’, but rather ‘Everything you need to know about commissioning and the delivery process.’ Although I don’t suppose you’ll like the ‘delivery’ bit, they talk about process in the singular, in other words a set of procedures. They do indeed occasionally use the expression ‘commissioning processes’, but a quick glance suggests that they only do this when they’re referring to several different channels or radio stations, or across the whole of the BBC, where there will no doubt be several or even many different sets of procedures.

But I think we’re missing the point here. I don’t think Dimbleby was criticising the expression ‘commissioning processes’ at all.

He starts off by saying that he has a lot of time for the new director general of the BBC and thinks he ‘will untangle’ some of the things that had happened at the BBC - he then says, and I think we need the whole quote here:

‘The language of management speak has seeped into key bits of the BBC where it shouldn’t exist. And the whole language that John Birt introduced of commissioning processes and dividing up things that had been united took hold, and what got lost was some of the direct responsibility for things, which is why we had this catastrophe last year and earlier this year where the habit of leading had given way to constant buck-passing.’

Dimbleby is not, I think, commenting on the expression ‘commissioning processes’ but on ‘the language of commissioning processes’. After all he’s presumably not criticising the phrase ‘dividing things up that had been united’. It perhaps helps to know a little about John Birt here. First of all he was himself famous for using management-speak, so famous it was known as Birtspeak. Secondly, he completely reorganised the management at the BBC. Now I don’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, but it was certainly very controversial and unpopular with a lot of the old guard. Part of that reorganisation was the introduction in 1993 of so-called ‘Producer Choice’, which gave producers ‘the power to buy services from outside the BBC’. (Wikipedia). In other words, instead of being done in-house, certain activities were ‘commissioned’ out. And no doubt the jargon used for this process included a lot of Birtisms, which is what I think Dimbleby’s remarks really refer to.

But I think his real beef is with the reorganisation itself, and what he sees as a loss of people taking direct responsibility for things. I also think that Birt introduced professional managers into jobs that would have previously been done by professional broadcasters, and it was the language used by these people that Dimbleby didn't like - perhaps expressions like 'cost centres' and 'deliverables' etc. I think this is what he means when he says 'The language of management speak has seeped into key bits of the BBC where it shouldn’t exist', in other words where there should be professional broadcasters rather than professional ,managers.

Dimbleby then goes on to say ‘People get promoted for speaking the language of outreach. Nobody seems to be able to do anything to turn people back into human beings who can talk directly to each other. They are compelled by organisational structures.’

‘Outreach’ at the BBC is connected with corporate social responsibility, so there’s probably some scope for meaningless management-speak there.

So, in my opinion, Dimbleby wasn’t talking so much about specific expressions on aesthetic grounds, but the sort of corporate gobbledygook which he sees as avoiding responsibility. To me it is the 'organisational structures' he is really criticising, especially where they are comprised of professional managers, and the language that goes with them.

@jayles - a few typos in the last paragraph:
'Google it'
But Etymology Online lists it as being ...
I just can't resist ...

@jayles - in terms of common usage, linguists would normally base it on corpora, where books would only appear once. There are certainly a few books in the British National Corpus, but I think they only make up a relatively small part. You have a point with Google Books and the Bible, but I think you have to be very careful with Google Books and even more Google Search results in any case, which bear no relationship to the actual number of entries listed. And I imagine this goes for other search engines as well.

Is the King James Bible in Ngram? - Change the start year to 1600 and enter "In the beginning God created" (it has a maximum of five words). There's a huge spike around 1611, the KJV's publication date, so I think we can assume, not only that it is in Ngram, but that more than one copy is being counted. But I imagine that it is an exception. Good point!

In answer to when 'just Google it' became popular, just Ngram it. Well maybe not. According to Ngram, 'Google i' seems to have really started to take off around 1997. But Etymology Online lists as being first used as a verb in 2000. The verb Google was added to the OED in 2006. Sorry, In just can't resist 'rushing off' to my sources. As a non-Google user, you may be interested to know that (today) Google accounts for 94.9% of visitors to my blog who come via a search engine, and I don't think it's ever less than about 93%.

@Brus - re: assertionism - sorry, that's a neologism, possibly coined by the blogger Eugene Volokh, and 'bandied about' somewhat on linquistics forums. I'd forgotten it wasn't common currency.

State of play on your original point:

1) Having reread the text I agree with you Fettes' use of about capitals.

2) I agree that the use of feedback as a verb is strange, although not apparently unheard of in (British) academic circles. However I have no problems with feedback as a noun. It gets a two star frequency rating at Macmillan, so its use is quite common and the meaning is likely to be known to most people. The sort of management-speak I have a problem with is that which leaves employees (or customers) bamboozled.

3) Check-in - largely agree with you, but as I said before, it seems to me that the main signs at Gatwick, and British Airways don't hyphenate, and I wouldn't regard it as a very serious problem.

I have some minor disagreements with you about business English, however. But as I'm having serious computer problems at the moment, I'll get this off, and get back to you about that and David Dimbleby's comments later.

@Brus - The BBC commissions programmes from independent producers. It presumably has processes for doing this. What on earth is wrong with calling them commissioning processes?