Intricate, flowery language can be a lovely thing. Curling up on the sofa of a Sunday afternoon with a great work of literature is one of life’s pleasures. But even Thomas Hardy would balk at some of the language that made the Local Government Association’s list of banned jargon this week.
Council leaders have issued a list of 200 words and phrases that are not to be used in communication with the public. Particularly horrific examples included “cross-cutting” [everyone working together] and “predictors of beaconicity” [what makes councils good]. Shudder.
But if I received an email that told me I had been given “the flexibilities and freedoms to utilise the improvement levers for community engagement,” I would have absolutely no idea what I was supposed to be doing.
According to the dictionary in the Van offices, to communicate is to convey information or reveal clearly. Anything that involves “provider vehicles”, “rebaselining” or “reconfigured revenue streams” isn’t communication: it’s rubbish.
But whilst we’re all sitting at our desks, feeling smug that we don’t need our knuckles rapped over our use of indecipherable language, it’s worth pausing to think about the wider issue.
In the field of professional communications, PROs need to ensure that we do what we’re paid to do: communicate, rather than indulge in clever wordplay (or should that be “semantic wizardry”?!) for the sake of it. Wordiness doesn’t make anyone sound more intelligent a if message is concealed rather than conveyed, and there’s no point in using a paragraph when a sentence will do.
And if we’re ever tempted to “initiate coterminous stakeholder engagement during a refreshment symposium”, we need to take a deep breath, and have a chat over a cup of tea instead.
