“THERE’S NO nice way of saying this,” they say – and then they try to find one. Euphemisms are an essential part of losing your job, and none of them helps a bit. There are two ways employment comes to an end: on the one hand, the people go and the jobs disappear with them; on the other, the people go and are promptly replaced by other people. These are different situations in law, but constantly confused in language. The first, of course, is called “redundancy”: the word, first recorded here in the sixteenth century, comes from the Latin redundans, meaning “overflowing”. When an organisation is “overflowing” with workers, possibly because its workload has shrunk, it will find some of them “redundant”. Technically, po