First, the
Pope appears not to like adjectives – at least not “authentic” which I
confess I quite like. He certainly doesn’t like the qualifying “authentic
Christian”
“We have
fallen into the culture of adjectives and adverbs, and we have forgotten the
strength of nouns … Why say authentically Christian? It is Christian! The mere
fact of the noun ‘Christian’, ‘I am Christ’ is strong: it is an adjective noun,
yes, but it is a noun.
“The
communicator must make people understand the weight of the reality of nouns
that reflect the reality of people. And this is a mission of communication: to
communicate with reality, without sweetening with adjectives or adverbs.”
So far, so Orwellian…in the best sense of George Orwell’s classic guide
to clear expression and thinking - “Politics
and the English Language” – written in 1946.
But I was bit taken aback by another statement which runs as follows -
“But what should
communication be like?” he said. “One of the things you must not do is
advertising, mere advertising. You must not behave like human businesses that
try to attract more people … To use a technical word: you must not proselytise.
It is not Christian to proselytise.”
I’m sure a lot of missionaries will have something to say about that!
It was in fact only a couple of months ago that the newly-appointed
Leader of the House of Commons, one Jacob
Rees-Mogg set out to his staff come basic rules of language. He doesn’t
want to see the following words or phrases – “hopefully”, “due to”, “meet with”,
“got”, “equal”,
I actually have a lot of sympathy with people who get upset by some
words which have crept into our language in the last few decades - although Moggs' selection is just a little bit....eccentric,,,There are lots of others I would rather have in my sights
Thirty Six years before Orwell, Ambrose Bierce was another (American) journalist whose pithy and tough definitions of everyday words, in his newspaper column, attracted sufficient attention to justify a book “The Devil’s Dictionary” whose fame continues unto this day.
A dentist, for example, he defined as “a magician who puts metal into
your mouth and pulls coins out of your pocket”. A robust scepticism about both
business and politics infused his work
And at the millennium, I started to include in my project documents a
little glossary questioning the jargon being used by consultants in the “institution-building”
business which has become “JustWords - a sceptic’s glossary and bibliography for the fight against the
pretensions and perversities of power”. That contains a lot of references to
other gems such as The
Devil’s Financial Dictionary by Jason Zweig (2015)
In 2007, the Local Government Association felt it necessary to recommend
that 100 words be banned (not the same thing as book burning!!), And two years
later it had expanded the list
to 200 words -. Some of the words have me baffled (I have not lived in the
UK for 30 years!) but I find this is a quite excellent initiative. The
offensive words included -
Advocate,
Agencies, Ambassador, Area based, Area focused, Autonomous, Baseline, Beacon,
Benchmarking, Best Practice, Blue sky thinking, Bottom-Up, Can do culture,
Capabilities, Capacity, Capacity building, Cascading, Cautiously welcome,
Challenge, Champion, Citizen empowerment, Client, Cohesive communities,
Cohesiveness, Collaboration, Commissioning, Community engagement, Compact,
Conditionality, Consensual, Contestability, Contextual, Core developments, Core
Message, Core principles, Core Value, Coterminosity, Coterminous, Cross-cutting,
Cross-fertilisation, Customer, Democratic legitimacy, Democratic mandate, Dialogue,
Double devolution, Downstream, Early Win, Embedded, Empowerment, Enabler, Engagement,
Engaging users, Enhance, Evidence Base, Exemplar, External challenge, Facilitate,
Fast-Track, Flex, Flexibilities and Freedoms, Framework, Fulcrum, Functionality,
Funding streams, Gateway review, Going forward, Good practice, Governance, Guidelines,
Holistic, Holistic governance, Horizon scanning, Improvement levers, Incentivising,
Income streams, Indicators, Initiative, Innovative capacity, Inspectorates (a
bit unfair!), Interdepartmental surely not?), Interface, Iteration, Joined up, Joint
working, level playing field, Lever (unfair on Kurt Lewin!), Leverage, Localities,
Lowlights (??), Mainstreaming, Management capacity, Meaningful consultation (as
distinct from meaningless?), Meaningful dialogue (ditto?), Mechanisms, menu of
Options, Multi-agency, Multidisciplinary, Municipalities (why?), Network model,
Normalising, Outcomes, Output, Outsourced, Overarching, Paradigm, Parameter, Participatory,
Partnership working, Partnerships, Pathfinder, Peer challenge, Performance
Network, Place shaping, Pooled budgets, Pooled resources, Pooled risk, Populace,
Potentialities, Practitioners (what’s wrong with that?), Preventative services,
Prioritization, Priority, Proactive (damn!), Process driven, Procure, Procurement,
Promulgate, Proportionality, Protocol,
Quick win
(damn again), Rationalisation, Revenue Streams, Risk based, Robust, Scaled-back,
Scoping, Sector wise, Seedbed, Self-aggrandizement (why not?), service users, Shared
priority, Signpost, Social contracts ,Social exclusion, spatial, Stakeholder, Step
change, Strategic (come off it!), Strategic priorities, Streamlined, Sub-regional,
Subsidiarity (hallelujah); Sustainable (right on!), sustainable communities, Symposium,
Synergies, Systematics, Taxonomy, Tested for Soundness, Thematic, Thinking
outside of the box, Third sector, Toolkit, Top-down (?), Trajectory, Tranche, Transactional,
Transformational, Transparency, Upstream, Upward trend, Utilise, Value-added, Vision,
Visionary,
And what about coach, mentor, drivers, human resource management, social
capital, tsar ???? Anyway – a brilliant initiative (if you will forgive the
term)
And in 2009 a UK Parliamentary Committee actually invited people to
submit examples of confusing language which they then reported about in a
report entitled Bad
Language!
The final gem which hit me this morning was this great piece on the
semi-colon and the art of punctuation
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