Language keeps evolving but why is management speak littered with meaningless buzzwords and clichés
Being told that the bushes on our wishbone have gone, our sump is dripping and we've got mayonnaise under our oil filler cap would leave most of us either nodding blankly or reaching for the medical encyclopaedia. Hats off then to Halfords, the car servicing company, which has put together an easy-to-understand (and Plain English Campaign-approved) glossary of terms to help drivers navigate the minefield of motor jargon.
A survey commissioned by the company found that although 91 per cent of motorists are bewildered by jargon, 40 per cent pretend to understand what mechanics tell them and 48 per cent have paid for work they don't understand. It is, as a Halfords spokesman admits, and the rest of us know to our cost, "very easy to bamboozle them".
Employing jargon to fool others is not the sole preserve of some motor mechanics. Every industry has its own lingo, but while it is (just about) acceptable to bandy buzzwords among the initiated, inflicting them on outsiders is lazy, rude and arrogant.
Business has developed its own strain of jargon-management speak-which sounds so important that it has been widely adopted. Children don't learn any more, they "access the curriculum". Events don't happen in the future, but "going forward". And things don't affect other things, they "impact on" them. Why has it become necessary to use several clunky, complicated words instead of one simple one?
Part of the answer lies in the results of another recent survey, in which staff working for big companies admitted they used management speak to disguise the fact that they haven't done their job properly, hoping to bluff their way through with impressive words and phrases, even if they don't know what they mean. This suggests that the practice is institutionalised, and if it is, it comes from the top, and if it stems from the top it will be used inside and outside the organisation to confuse, obfuscate and dissimulate. And this is where jargon gets not just silly, but dangerous.
Some people argue that jargon played no small part in the recent global economic and financial crisis. Witness the following from Geraint Anderson, the former financial analyst who lifted the lid on how the City works.
In his 2008 book, Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile, Anderson wrote: "...we in the City use arcane language and peculiar terminology to confuse those who don't earn as much as us... It makes us sound like we're doing something extraordinarily complicated and technically unfathomable, and keeps our potential detractors in the dark. We are a much harder target if the 'common man' feels intimidated by our complex world and doesn't even understand what we do. We push around bits of paper. That's what we do. That's all we do."
Non-executives are not common men, but not even they understood what executives in the banks were doing—and they dared not ask either, for fear of looking stupid. But their passive collusion in the grand bamboozlement is no worse than our collective reluctance to challenge nonsensical language.
I've been editing the diaries of a group of friends who trekked to Everest more than 40 years ago. They were in their early twenties, yet their writing is some of the freshest, clearest and most evocative I have read for some time-penned though much of it was at the end of long days of hard climbing. It's such a contrast to some of the turgid jargon-choked offerings from esteemed academics and consultants that I sometimes have to unpick, sentence by sentence, to reveal any meaning.
At what point do people learn to "un-write"—is it when they stop caring about what they are writing about? Chrissie Maher, founder of the Plain English Campaign, believes that it's everybody's responsibility to communicate clearly, and everyone's right to have information they can understand. It's hard to argue with that. Of course language evolves and should be allowed free expression but, like everything, it needs boundaries and rules to anchor it.
I have my own pet hates-the phrase "I'm sat here" tops the list, with random apostrophes and capital letters hard on its heels. One friend has never recovered from being congratulated on an "enervating" speech, and can hardly bring himself to use his new Kindle after discovering the user guide confuses compliment and complement.
The haste and brevity of the communications media du jour-texts and tweets—are no excuse for poor writing, although they help to explain it. People have lost the habit of thinking about what they want to say before they write it down. So they shouldn't be surprised if their audience doesn't pay much attention to what they've said either.
