Jargon-busters pass sentence on local council 'gobbledegook'

Two articles appearing on successive days in The Telegraph last week reported on a new guide published by the Local Government Association which seeks to ban over 200 jargon words from use by local councils. The LGA says that words and phrases such as 'coterminous' and 'predictors of beaconicity' are 'meaningless management speak' that hinder communication with the public.

"Congratulations Dave! I don't think I've read a more

beautifully evasive and subtly misleading public statement

in all my years in government!"

The first of these articles lists some of the words and phrases that have now been banned, while in the second article Ed West looks at some examples of local council job advertisements that use such jargon and asks 'What does any of this mean?' A good question, Mr West. Apart from just being downright baffling, though, Ed West argues that 'jargon makes it easier to disguise one's actions with euphemisms for inaction, bureaucracy or waste'. This is surely a serious point, and one which draws on some of the issues that we have considered when studying Language and Representation, and which we are about to come back to in the A2 Language Debates synoptic unit.

Of course, Ed West is not the first person to make this kind of observation about the language of politicians. One of the most famous diatribes on such linguistic 'trickery' is George Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language', written in 1946. In this seminal publication, Orwell argues:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the
countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants
to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Orwell goes on to condemn a range of jargon and euphemistic terms used by the politicians of the day and, while he was writing more than 60 years ago, much of the language to which he refers would be very much at home in the lexicon of a 21st century politician. You can read the complete essay here. You'll find this a very interesting read... and a very useful one if the topic of Language and Ideology should happen to come up in this year's synoptic paper!

With thanks to Jeremy for bringing the first Telegraph article to my attention.