Ever since that symbolic moment when British Rail stopped referring to passengers and substituted the word customers, the language of commerce, the free market and consumerism has been infiltrating the UK public sector.
For the generation that has come of age only recently, this probably doesn’t matter. They will refer to sourcing a leisure solution rather than ‘booking a holiday’, and talk about empowering themselves as stakeholders or leveraging their CVs without irony. Babyboomers, however, see things differently.
Persistent grumbling on newspaper letter-pages and radio phone-ins about the crossing-over of private-sector jargon, bolstered by the agitations of the Plain English Campaign, culminated earlier this year in the Local Government Association’s attempts to identify 200 expressions it wants to ban.
There are some doubtful formulations on their list: coterminous engagement and predictors of beaconicity are ponderous or pretentious; blue-sky thinking and going forward are undoubtedly clichés. But as so often the zealots have got it wrong, including words that seem to me to be blameless — initiative, vision, holistic, streamlined, welcome and wellbeing — and words that express essential working priorities, such as customer itself, dialogue, robust, benchmark, synergy and transparency.
Everyone rightly deplores terminology that is intentionally baffling or misleading, or used to intimidate outsiders, and some of the terms on the published lists could fit these categories. But isn’t there something deeply patronising about reducing the communications between public servants and the public to a simplistic, banal lowest common denominator? The average tabloid buyer is said to have a reading age of only nine, but does that mean that all communication has to be pitched at her or him? Jargon is not only the language of bullying and bluster, it encompasses the language of innovation, the semi-technical vocabulary of the professions, the necessarily precise and formal style of official and legal pronouncements.
Linguists have their own jargon, of course, and refer to attempts to purge the mother tongue as prescriptivism and verbal or linguistic hygiene.
I think we should let our vocabulary run where it will and not dismiss the professional discourse of late modernity (as cultural theorists have it), not try to ban it. Instead — to use one of the LGA’s least favourite terms — engage with it!
Send your favourite buzzwords, jargon and new and exotic usages to tony.thorne@kcl.ac.uk
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