Serving vs. Servicing

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mike in Greencastle, Indiana.

Hi, Mike.

What’s up?

Hey, Mike.

I’m doing well.

How about you folks?

Okay.

What can we help you with?

Well, I kind of have a pet peeve or at least a question about the usage of the word service as a verb as compared to the word serve as a verb.

I used to work in marketing for a major investment firm, and part of the job was writing presentations and brochures and annual reports and things.

And any time I talked about serving our customers, the other reviewers would change it to servicing our customers.

And to me, that seems wrong in a lot of ways.

Does it suggest certain barnyard acts to you?

It does.

Maybe it’s just because I grew up in the country, but not just barnyard acts.

But to me, when you speak of servicing something, that implies either that it’s servicing an object, like I took my car to be serviced or the HVAC guy came and serviced my air conditioner.

Or it’s, as you said, the act of mating.

You know, a bull services cattle.

So, Mike, do they give you any reasoning for why they would change it?

Not really.

I think they were just bosses or maybe that was the norm within that company.

-huh, -huh.

Yeah, I would much rather go with serving.

Yeah.

I don’t see.

You serve a customer.

You serve a client.

Yeah.

You service a machine.

At best, it seems less personal to say you service a customer or at worst, again, you’re treating them as objects or in a scandalous way.

Well, you know, serve used to also have that copulatory meaning a long time ago, but it’s been 100 years since that was really common.

So serve is definitely the better choice now, whereas in 1900, it might have had the same connotations as service does to you.

And besides that, it just seems like an unnecessary addition of a syllable, sort of like changing use to utilize when you don’t need to do that.

Yeah, people loving the particular jargon sounding, right, of the verbing of a noun.

Yeah.

I mean, I still call customer service, but that’s a different thing.

Right.

Maybe the implication of increased formality was behind their preference for service rather than serve.

It could be.

Yeah, people do have a tendency, particularly in business environments, to add on layers of separation between them and their audience because they feel that kind of remove properly demonstrates the hierarchy, the power differential in the relationship, whereas something that’s more familiar might seem like they are misdirecting or misguiding the customer to thinking that the relationship is different than it is.

Unfortunately, I think the relationship should be as close as possible when you’re looking at making a good impression for the company, conducting marketing activities and so on.

So rather than separating yourself, I think you should try to do the opposite.

Yeah, sounds like we’re with you.

I would never say, except as a joke, servicing a customer.

Or servicing our listeners.

I would say we serve our listeners.

We serve them, yeah.

And the nice thing about that is it has connotations, serving has connotations of inverting the actual hierarchy, you know, making it clear that you see yourself at their beck and call or you see yourself as providing a thing that they require or that they want.

Well, that’s a really good point.

Yeah, sort of like servant leadership.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it’s a different thing if you take your car in to be serviced.

Yeah, because it’s not between two people really, right?

It’s between a machine and a mechanic.

Right.

So, Mike, we’re with you.

Yeah.

Well, good, but I do have to admit that friends and family sometimes call me a grammar Nazi.

Oh, yeah. Don’t let him get away with that. Say that you’re a grammar fan.

There you go.

You’re an aficionado of grammar.

A grammarian. A grammando. Something like that.

There you go.

Thanks, Mike, for your call.

All right. Thank you very much.

Take care, Mike. Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.