“Wellderly, webinar, disbenefits and under-capacitated are among new forms of jargon being used by the public sector, a survey has revealed. Such impenetrable phrases are on a list of banned words published by the Local Government Association (LGA)”.

It seems to have become a new biennial news story about office jargon, especially in councils:

• Why do councils love jargon?
• Workplace jargon isolates staff

At least this time around the LGA admits that jargon is often necessary for internal use:

“The LGA said it was ‘impossible’ for organisations to avoid all jargon in internal communications but there was no excuse for such language to be used in public information”.

Indeed.

Of course, as the point I made last time around – council’s don’t deliberately want to obfuscate, it’s not in their interest to. When council-speak does leak out, overwhelmingly that’s due to a staff member in a service area putting out communication themselves, rather than – as they are supposed to – going through their service area’s communications teams, part of whose core function is to check the text & convert it into plain English.

But sadly in the current era of cuts and “slashing make-work back-office paper-pushers in order to protect front-line services”, communications staff are considered superfluous, and communications budgets - both for activity and for salaries – are being slashed.

So with a reduced number of people employed in local government to ensure your leaflet reads like it was written in English, expect more webinar trialogues over the coming years.

The other day my friend Pete Ashton posted an article in which he declared he was no longer a Social Media Consultant. Sort of.

Or rather, it’s not that he’s no longer doing what he’s been doing for a living for the last couple of years to go and do something else, rather, that – cutting a long story short – he’s not going to be describing himself as such any more.

Those of us who’ve been doing this thing for ages (especially those of us who have been doing it since long before the term was coined) have never been particularly comfortable with the term ’social media’, but we’ve grudgingly accepted it on the grounds that it doesn’t cause share prices to tumble on the stock market, nobody’s harmed by it, and the horses aren’t frightened by it. And nobody’s been able to think of anything better that’s caught on in a snappy way. Myself, I thought the term collaborative media might have legs (since that better describes what we do), but nobody else has nailed their colours to that mast.

Anyway, part of the point Pete makes is that whilst it was an OKish term for a while, it has now become polluted, as the PR people and the Marketeers and the all the other people have moved in thinking they need to have a ’social media strategy’ for their organisation, fundamentally missing the point about what social media is. It’s media, that’s social – that’s collaborative, interactive, and conversational. You’re having a conversation with your audience, not making a speech to them – and in a conversation you listen and respond, not just talk. And the ‘professionals’ moving in singularly fail to realise this – they want to have a Twitter feed, but want to have every post to their Twitter feed signed off by a manager before it goes out!

Some time after Pete published his article, he posted to Twitter giving a real-world example of why he wrote his post:

Only a year ago, the conventional wisdom was that blogs were dead and microblogging would soon replace them. Twitter was supposed to kill blogs because it’s so much simpler to publish one sentence fragment at a time rather than whole thoughts bunched together into what is known in the trade as ‘paragraphs’.

It beggars belief how anybody writing for what’s supposed to be a respectable technology blog could possibly think that.

To think that Twitter might have killed blogging because it’s easier to publish a sentence than it is to publish a collection of paragraphs is like saying that crisps might kill tartiflette because it’s easier to get a packet of Walkers than it is to get hold of Reblochon cheese. If I post to Twitter, it’s not because it’s ‘easier’, it’s because it’s frankly silly of me to log into Wordpress and faff about trying to come up with at least 200 hundred words for a narrative just to say that the water level of the canal by the NIA is quite high.

Admittedly, myself and my friends have often commented to each other how we all seem to be blogging less since we’ve been using Twitter more – but that’s not in the sense of microblogging killing fullblogging, it’s in the sense of a combination of the way we’ve repurposed our use of Twitter itself, and also that we send the appropriate communication to the appropriate channels. When I write an article here, I’m writing for the world and aware that some of my friends will be reading. When I write a post to Twitter, I’m writing for my friends and aware that some of the world will be reading. It’s as simple as that, and it’s not a competition.

So there.

(Pete’s article also raised a couple of other interesting resonances for me which I may well write about in a future post)

“Local councils have been warned over a slew of jargon that baffles ordinary people, but why do they love to obfuscate?”

Erm, well, the sad fact is by and large councils don’t love to obfuscate; it’s in nobody’s interest to.

Now of course there’s no denying that jargon does get out to the public, and sometimes the person writing a document genuinely forgets that the word footway is not generally the word most people use for the pavement. But by and large, most councils do go to great lengths to try to ensure that what they are sending out to the public is written in easy to read, plain english.

But wait ! Reading deeper into this article, it becomes apparent that what it is criticising is not communication with the general public, but technical communication between council staff, or communication between technical council staff and technical people in external agencies.

It then goes on to further make its point by presenting a list of technical words used in technical documents with their translations:

• Predictors of beaconicity – What makes councils good
• Coterminosity – Having same boundaries
• Improvement levers – the tools to get the job done
• Place-shaping – creating places where people can thrive
• Revenue stream – money/income
• Slippage – delay
• Holistic governance – taking everything in
• Stakeholder – organisation, or occasionally person, with a stake in the success of something
• Synergy – thing working better when done together
• Transformational – to do with change
• Best practice – right way to do things
• Bottom-up – based on ordinary people
• Community engagement – getting ordinary people involved
• Subsidiarity – the principle by which something should be done locally unless it is better done at a higher level of government

And this does somewhat undermine the article’s argument.

A document using all of the technical words once in it would amount to 21 words. Using the translated versions puts the word count up to 82 – and that’s only with the words used once per document.

Plain english is as much about brevity as it is about using words people understand the meaning of.

“Needless jargon in the workplace is baffling employees and widening the divide between management and staff, a survey suggests. Investors in People said that the proliferation of phrases such as ‘blue-sky thinking’ and ‘brain dump’ was damaging to British industry”.

Is this actually true? It would be interesting to see the actual survey questions, and how loaded they were; I do very much doubt there has actually been a ‘proliferation’ of needless so-called management-speak anyway, and when it is used gratuitously I predict that, just as anywhere I’ve ever worked, the user is quickly laughed out of the office for being a total prat.

But the main reason I rate this as a non-story is because it is hardly a new story – the epitome of a management-speak gobshite was Gus Hedges in Drop the Dead Donkey dating way back to 1990 – that’s 16 years ago – and the phenomenon itself surely goes back further to the rise of yuppie in the mid-1980s. So why bring it up again as if it’s something new?

“Cows have regional accents like humans, language specialists have confirmed – they decided to examine the issue after dairy farmers noticed their cows had slightly different moos, depending on which herd they came from”.

The story is accompanied recordings of moos of different cows from different parts of the country, all of which sound different. Is this really surprising? Have you ever heard an individual cow, or any other animal for that matter, make the same moo twice?

There’s also a comment from a linguistics lecturer, who on the Today programme interview on the piece said yes, it was indeed possible that animals from one part of the country may indeed sound a bit like each other but slightly different from the same animals elsewhere in the country, because just like humans, animals learn how to make their noises from the other animals around them.

Does it take research to work this one out?