I had a good chuckle to myself this morning on reading an article brought to my attention by somebody on Twitter.

Apparently local authorities are trying to standardise their written output, avoiding jargon and buzzwords to optimise communicability of message. In other words, they have decided that it’s time everybody started writing in good old plain English so that people will have half a clue what they’re talking about.

Among the joyously silly nuggets of nonsense they have decided to ban are “Coterminosity” – I presume this to have something to do with double meanings, “Democratic legitimacy” – haven’t a clue, and the wonderful (completely unintelligible) “Predictors of Beaconicity”. I am particularly impressed with how Beaconicity appears to merit its own capital letter; is it a proper noun? Perhaps Beaconicity is a religion or festival that we have been previously unaware of. It sounds like fun anyway…

I am no stranger to corporate jargon, having spent time working in project management for a bank in previous years. I’m pretty familiar with the concept of “deliverables” and “silo approaches” now, but when I started I was clueless. Being a bit of a fan (theoretically anyway) of the school of thought whereby the quality of writing increases in direct proportion to the number of things you can keep out of it, I found the mind-boggling project-speak a bit hard to get on board with. I remember once having to stop a programme manager in the middle of a conference call because I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about. I don’t think he was best pleased, but I thought he’d have been even less pleased when I failed to “outline project deliverables” within acceptable timescales; due to having absolutely no idea what they were, or where I could find them.  

Luckily, my boss at the time was a very sensible woman, and shared my opinion that if project managers were to concentrate on actually doing things rather than sitting about talking about them in four syllable words, then there would be a lot less “slippage” out there to be reported on. She and I used to play mute bullshit bingo in meetings, preparing lists of common terms in advance and ticking each slice of verbal nonsense off as it was uttered by another self-important programme manager. To this day I have fantasies of going back in time to leap up, shrieking “Bingo” during one of those meetings; unfortunately I didn’t have quite enough of a career death wish at the time to make that sort of behaviour feasible.  

Anyway, before I fall on my own sword by making this article too wordy, I’ll leave you here with a link to the 200 jargon terms officially banned by local authorities – I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.