When Ed Balls seemed to announce the other week that a Labour government would cut pensions, he said: "The majority of most welfare spending is in fact going to people over 60. That's the truth and we should look across the piece."
Across the what? The piece of what? Commenter glamorganist said: "I know it's off-topic but I can't concentrate when I have to read phrases like 'across the piece'." Frankly, nor can I.
The peculiar "across the piece" has become common office jargon, though it is rather mystifying. It means simply "throughout" or "everywhere", but it seems that no one knows quite why. The variant "across the piste" is often heard, presumably not implying that people or fencers make a habit of skiing or fighting sideways, but this is a minority variant of much more recent origin: it's probably a simple mishearing, or an attempt (ironically incorrect) to sound more sophisticated.
Synonymous with the business use of "across the piece" – and much more familiar — is the phrase "across the board", whose origin is said to lie in an each-way bet in horse-racing. But why "board" might have given way to "piece" in modern office-talk is mysterious, unless "board" was thought offensive to wooden people, like Tolkein's talking trees, the Ents.
What seems the likeliest origin is the sense of "piece", venerable in English, that means an area of enclosed or otherwise demarcated land (as in the park in Cambridge called Parker's Piece). The phrase "across the piece" is used in such a sense in William Gilpin's Observations on the River Wye of 1800, where he points out glumly that Nature rarely offers a completely harmonious composition to the eye:
Either the foreground or the background is disproportioned; or some awkward line runs across the piece; or a tree is ill-placed; or a bank is formal; or something or other is not exactly what it should be.
Slightly later, "across the piece" was also used in the context of practical matters, such as in an 1807 printing patent (which offers variation of the pattern "by changing the order of figures across the piece"), or in Edward H Knight's 1874 The Practical Dictionary of Mechanics, which defines a "traverse-saw" as "a cross-cutting saw which moves on ways across the piece". Perhaps from there "across the piece" came to mean "covering the whole width" – of anything at all, rather than just a piece of lumber.
As Balls's use shows, "across the piece" is one example of office jargon that has gone viral in the world of politics too. Language-spotters should tip their hats in particular to the virtuosic under-secretary at the Ministry of Justice, Jonathan Djanogly MP, who managed in a single answer to the Public Administration Select Committee's 2012 hearings on justice administration to use "across the piece" an impressive four times. He understood why people wanted "to have some kind of policy format across the piece"; he reported that "we can look across the piece in terms of where these tribunals actually sit" and that "we now have the ability to look across the piece in terms of judicial careers"; and he reassured the committee members that "we are now looking at courts and tribunals across the piece".
Balls could easily have said "We should look at all options" or "We should consider everything." Unfortunately he said, as though it came quite naturally to him, "We should look across the piece" – and in doing so, he might well have alienated not a few voters who are constitutionally allergic to the cliquey argot of managerialese.
