Good comment from the Express
http://www.express.co.uk/comment/exp...-plain-English
Britain gets conquered about once every thousand years. Suddenly there’s a new ruling class with a new language. A millennium ago it was the Normans, who brought French with them. This time around Britain has been conquered by its own public sector and our new ruling class speaks its own impenetrable dialect of cobblers. Listen:“Key elements of the programme are being strengthened to ensure the focus of the programme is on track for implementation and delivery.”
No, it’s not a sentence from the amusing gobbledegook generator on the Plain English Campaign website. It’s a real and very typical excerpt from a local NHS plan to improve things in the year ahead. Happily there will also be:“Continued strengthening of the programme arrangements and governance” and “Continuing the deep dives and assurance of quality and safety”. Good to hear.
Our public sector fervently strings together billions of words but the plain sense in all of it wouldn’t ? ll a Hello Kitty notebook. The truth-burying circumlocutions are breeding faster than ever. Best value. Beaconicity. Solutions. Legacy. Gateway Review. It’s the background hum of the state as it brings key deliverables to a PFI near you.
It can be boring or even bleakly amusing but then it’s used to cover up lethal public incompetence, as it has been throughout the MidStaffordshire hospitals debacle, and that’s when the fun stops. Public-sector chiefs use words and phrases that are so uncoupled from any underlying reality that there is nothing to check or refute, nothing for blame to hook on to.
In the NHS improvement plan I quoted just now, the word “workstream” occurs 34 times but the word “nurse” does not occur once. If that plan fails, nobody’s name is attached to anything real and measurable. It’s pre-emptive coverup – deception in depth. It makes you nostalgic for good, honest lies.
WHEN I was an NHS PR man around the turn of the century I witnessed a dangerous change in attitudes towards patients that started at the top with new jargon. It has percolated down to the wards through the past decade. The Department of Health hired a “media professional” experienced in consumer PR to turn the NHS into a “wellness brand”, purging it of all those negative connotations of sickness.I had designed a patients’ newsletter for Ealing to be called “Healing” with an extra-big H so you could pick out the word ealing in the title – clever, eh? That title was vetoed because it was “too medical” and did not “address the NHS’s role in promoting wellness and being a focus for the community”. Oh well.
At the same time my NHS colleagues were learning the new habit of calling people “service users” instead of patients. They began to say “accessing services” instead of “going to hospital”. Anyone could see patients becoming less real and more of an abstraction to the people who were supposed to plan and organise their treatment. We know how that ends. Jargon has a body count.
The Hallett report on the 7/7 bombings found that the various emergency services were hampered because they didn’t understand each other’s dialects. Jargon, officialese, call it what you will. It’s getting worse. Even public-sector jargoneers have had enough of one another’s unreadable screeds.
Birmingham Council’s Transport, Connectivity and Sustainability Scrutiny Committee complained last week that the new 30-page Smart City Vision Statement outlining a new, computerised Birmingham, only got to a point by page 22 – ( not the point, mind you, just a point.)
To be fair to the public sector (frontline key workers, all) business and politics are also doing their bit to suck the meaning out of the English language. We have become used to business people using the verb “to incentivise” but now they are beginning to say “to incent”, damn them. The use of “impact” as an overcooked verb, as in “this policy will impact my own constituents” is now so established in politics that it causes only mild earache but recently it’s been tortured into a new adverb “impactfully”. Spare us! Logistics used to mean military supply on the scale of D-Day. Now its just a mud-streaked word you see as a van overtakes you on the M1. Strategy used to mean what generals did.
Now it’s just the 1st Powerpoint slide in any sales presentation in any budget hotel.
New methods are now called “new paradigms” and all kinds of dangerous nuisances have been relabelled as “existential threats”. As the Left becomes less like a debating position and more like a sanctimonious cult it has stopped using words such as disagreement to describe other people’s views and started using the word “denial”.
But whether they start in business or Westminster, all new cant words get knocked off for use in public- sector strategy papers quicker than Gucci designs get knocked off for a Shenzhen street market.
It’s not only getting worse but more pervasive. The twisted language of officialdom is no longer a white-collar privilege. Coppers and parkies, clutching their electronic clipboards, are spouting it at us now. It’s “compliance with the dog control zone” these days, not “Gerrof that ? eld!” The ugly bugs we once knew as traffic wardens have turned into butterflies called Civil Enforcement Officers. Littering – disgraceful as it is – has been elevated to “environmental crime”. You might be accused
by council snoops of leaving your bin-lid open on “multiple” occasions instead of several occasions – it sounds a bit more like CSI Miami that way. This not a just language of heightened bureaucracy, it’s a new language of control.
THE verbiage of management is inescapable now we are micro-managed everywhere. On the East Coast line the guards, sorry, train managers, have begun to call railway stations “calling points” on the Tannoy to the annoyance and mild confusion of the passengers, sorry, customers.
Public transport is a domain where petty officialdom strictly imposes its own version of reality through perverse language. If you lose your ticket you will have to pay a “standard fare” several times the cost of any normal ticket, something we would call a penalty fare if we were speaking normal English. I have waited for an hour at a roofless, wall-less tram stop with a cold north-easterly whipping at my mac and a 360-degree view of the horizon, staring at the sign that said: “Smoking is prohibited in these premises.”
If officialese were only a vanity mirror for the officials to enjoy it wouldn’t be too bad. Librarians can call themselves “information curators” for all I care. Everyone with an indoor job seems to be some kind of curator these days. Unfortunately fancy new words for work are not harmless. They are helping our tax-fed bigwigs to settle into the new super-class – shameless, truth-proof and unsackable.
We don’t hear much about the art of government any more. It’s called “governance” now. Such a soft, mellow word. It does convey elegance and nuance instead of that crude, bitten-off word government that makes you think about action and results. Town Clerks call themselves Chief Executive Officers. Town planners and civil servants now presume to re-imagine things instead of change them. I have met public employees titled Change Manager. They couldn’t manage the change from a ? ver.
Every year satirical awards are given to perpetrators of gobbledegook. Not enough. We should mock and challenge all these illiterate swine far more ferociously because plain language is about survival. If only the Plain English Campaign had a provisional wing.
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