Council Jargon
Article published: Thursday, August 13th 2009
‘A symposium to establish a benchmark of best practice and set the quantum capacity for crosscutting dialogue…’ Struggling to comprehend? Don’t fret too much if you don’t understand. This jargon has all been ruled by the Local Government Association (LGA) to be too close to gibberish for councils to use.
These words are part of a list of 200 words that the LGA has banned for being incomprehensible. These include horrors like “re-baselining” and “taxonomy” as well as a few of the well-worn favourites such as “blue sky thinking” and “can-do attitude.”
But Mule notes that all of these words or phrases can be found throughout Manchester City Council (MCC) publications.
In fact MCC’s literature reads like a guide on how to confuse and befuddle the reader. They are bristling with jargon. The council’s much vaunted “Call to Action” document alone contains 70 of the 200 banned words and actually includes the baffling phase – “consultation symposium on neighbourhood climate change action.”
But why does the council feel the need to wrap all this information up in unintelligible gobbledygook? It is surely quite simple to get rid of ‘interface’, ‘utilise’ and ‘gateway’ and replace them with ‘talk to’, ‘use’ and ‘opportunity’. A cynical person might think the council doesn’t want the public to know what it’s up to.
But perhaps we should be thankful for small mercies and be glad that our search did not turn up any examples of what must be the most bizarre phrase on the list “predictors of beaconicity” – language that is sure to set even the most jargon-adept person’s head spinning.
Patrick Smith
More: Manchester
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