The word police appear to be alive and well in the United Kingdom these days. A group called the Local Government Association, which lobbies Parliament and others on behalf of local government, has banned an impressively long list of words that (in the LGA’s opinion) impede effective communication in government.
While the intent of word restriction is to promote a Plain English Campaign, the British media is having a field day with this political correctness saying (among other things) that the British Government is trying to dodge responsibility for the current financial crisis under the guise of better public communication.
The entire list of banned words can be found in this amusing Secret Scotland blog. As one who makes a living by the spoken and written word, I can sympathize with some of the words on the list, such as paradigm, citizen empowerment, community engagement, sustainable, scoping, and potentialities that are clearly meant to serve as double speak, while others are downright silly such as worklessness, predictors of beaconicity, and democratic legitimacy.
However, in their zeal, these folks have added an awful lot of plain, everyday words that would make normal communication rather difficult if one were forced to conduct a search-and-destroy mission on routine report writing and correspondence. For instance, how could we live without advocate, ambassador, baseline or benchmarking? Is the world really better off without client, customer, core principles or functionality? Is this really just a vast conspiracy to increase sales of Roget’s Thesaurus?
Let us hope this malediction doesn’t grow fins and swim across the Atlantic. Let us hope Americans do not suffer the imprecations of the word police. As for me, I think I will nominate malediction and imprecation as new additions to the what-the-hell-are-your-trying-to-say list.
Chris Crawford www.justiceserved.com
Photo credit = Microsoft clip art
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I posted a comment on the Secret Scotland blog referenced in this blog and received the following comment in return …
MY COMMENT:
Please forgive the wry observations of a Yank to this silly rise of the word police.
COMMENT BY THE SECRET SCOTLAND AUTHOR:
Consider it not only forgiven, but commended. It’s great, and I suggest anyone reading this far should also follow the link to your observation.
I heartily agree with your own observation, and your won choice of example highlight the very point I was attempting to emphasise.
We do need to put an end to the use of buzzwords (oops, sorry) and contrived language to hide, or obfuscate, otherwise easily understood expressions and meanings, but the list remains deeply flawed, and contains too many perfectly acceptable and plain words.
See their original post and all other comments here:
http://secretscotland.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/local-government-authority-banned-word-list/
It’s hard not to hate the use of a word like paradigm, as something worse, like modalities is sure to follow.
The goal should be clear and concise communication, not a restricted vocabulary. There are words on the list that should be sent packing, but a neologism like mainstreaming is a natural abbreviation of “bringing into the mainstream,” and downstream is a poetic way of describing subsequence.
[...] not sure I agree with all of these, but I don’t feel strongly enough to defend them. I have posted in the past about the word police who seem hell-bent at times to slap us around for use of perfectly acceptable words and [...]