Time for some plain speaking about rise of gobbledegook

Jargon and gibberish have become part of our working lives. But has the time come, asks Chris Bond, to stamp it out?

Just about anyone working in an office will tell you that jargon has become part and parcel of their daily lives, whether it’s contending with inscrutable terms like “re-baselining” and “predictors of beaconicity”, or being told by their boss that it’s time for a spot of “blue sky thinking.”

Such gobbledegook could be dismissed as nonsense if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s become so widespread. These kind of impenetrable expressions aren’t just appearing in government documents and business reports, they’re now cropping up in board meetings and general conversations, and jargon has now become so rife that the coroner in charge of the 7/7 inquests has spoken out against it.

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Speaking yesterday, on the hearing’s final day, Lady Justice Hallett let fly at Gary Reason, assistant commissioner of London Fire Brigade, after reference was made to “a conference demountable unit from a management centre” – or a portable incident room to you and me.

“As far as I can tell, management jargon is taking over organisations and perfectly sensible, straightforward titles are being changed,” she said. “This isn’t just somebody being pedantic about the use of English, which it appears to be... when it comes to managing incidents, people don’t understand what the other person is.”

The coroner said the problem had been an ongoing theme in hearing evidence. “I don’t know whether a crew manager is somebody who is responsible for supplies or is used to fighting fires. I have no idea.”

She added that clarity was key when crews were trying to ensure safety at a disaster scene, saying: “What worries me is all you senior people of these organisations are allowing yourselves to be taken over by management jargon and, as I say, it’s not just directed at you... I just think that you people at the top need to say we have to communicate with people in plain English.”

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Her comments caused laughter in the courtroom after months of her having to stop witnesses to explain acronyms and specialist terms.

She added: “So if you could do anything when you meet up with your fellow senior officers in whatever organisations to encourage the use of plain English, I, for one, would be enormously grateful and I think it would make everybody just that little bit more effective.”

Marie Claire, spokeswoman for the Plain English Campaign, is delighted that Lady Justice Hallett has spoken out.

“I think she deserves one of our plain English awards. When someone in her profession is willing to stand up and say that plain English is the way forward it shows that our message is getting through.”

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The Plain English Campaign was set up in 1979, and spearheads an ongoing battle for public information to be written so that its audience can read and understand what it says. Through its annual Golden Bull and Gobbledegook of the Week Awards, it exposes some of the nonsense we have to contend with, like a 229-word definition of “a bed” by the NHS back in 1993.

Last year’s Golden Bull winners included Boris Johnson for a Transport for London press release containing his comments on the bike hire scheme that refers to “a cyclised city” of “pioneers”.

Lanarkshire NHS also scooped a prize for a sentence in a 34-page self assessment document under the “clinical effectiveness” section referring to reports on infection rates.

It read: “These are cascaded to senior staff across the organisation through to frontline staff via a structured mechanism to facilitate ownership of data.”

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It’s enough to make your head hurt. But perhaps there’s a sense that if you sound like you know what you’re talking about then people are more likely to believe you.

Claire says the advent of email and social media have transformed the way we communicate. “Language is a very personal thing but it should still be clear and concise and creativity shouldn’t sacrifice understandability.

“In the past jargon used to be confined to the legal system and old, established professions, but now we have created our own management-speak made up of words that sound very important but which don’t mean anything. So in a sense, we’re to blame for buying into this language,” she says.

“Jargon is fine if it’s confined to the business world and people understand it, but if you can’t say something in plain English you probably don’t understand it.”

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