Data Governance

10 DISPOSE

Alison Holt

We use variants of the word ‘dispose’ in the English language in several different ways, including the following examples:

• chilling words in a crime thriller, such as ‘he disposed of the body’;
• remarkably mundane words, such as ‘he disposed of the banana skin in the bin’;
• less everyday phrases, such as ‘he disposed of his shares and property assets, including the family mansion’;
• as a state of availability, such as ‘I am fully at your disposal’.

The first example talks of an essentially non-reversible activity. In the second example, we have a person disposing of a banana skin, but not in a non-reversible way: the act of disposal here is just moving the problem along the chain to somebody else, who will now need ...