As someone who tries on the regular to drop critiques of the passive voice and its role in the obfuscation of the infrastructural, it’s very nice to see someone making the same point from a much larger soapbox than my own:

Through passive voice and other forms of labor-erasing language, delivery notifications ask us to imagine a world where things simply materialize, as if by magic, on our doorsteps. They help to uphold an economic fantasy that our purchases are not the result of human toil but rather the frictionless outcome of efficient market forces. Were they to acknowledge the role of human labor, the whole illusion would come undone. After all, it’s not the invisible hand that puts packages on our porches. It’s a human hand that companies have rendered invisible.

My “favourite” (which is to say “most loathed”) frequent example is the ubiquitous corporate or governmental non-apology, whose most condensed form is “mistakes were made”. I used to have a little list of such excuses culled from announcements on trains and train stations in the UK, but I seem to have mislaid it somewhere in the byzantine mess that passes for my filing system; I’m sure that anyone who lives or has lived in the UK and ever taken a train can think of a few for themselves. (In a way, I’m actually kind of glad to find that after more than three years away, I can no longer retrieve them from wetware memory.)

Justin Pickard once taught me a neat trick for identifying the passive voice: if the sentence in question can be completed with the pendant phrase “… by zombies”, then someone’s sweeping responsibility under the carpet.