“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:
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.
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