Jargon Busters

There was a very good news item in The Hindu today (21st June 2008). It is a subject very dear to my heart. So, I am giving it below as it is :

British bureaucrats have been warned : no more synergies, stakeholders or sustainable communities. The body that represents the UK's local authorities has told its members to stop using management buzzwords, saying they confuse people and prevent residents from understanding what local governments actually do.

The Local Government Association sent out a list of 100 "non words" to be avoided. The list includes the popular but vague term "empowerment", "coterminosity", a situation in which two organisations oversee the same geographical area; and "synergies", combinations in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Officials were told to ditch the term "revenue stream" in favour of income, as well as the imprecise "sustainable communities". The association also wanted councils to stop referring to local residents as "customers" or "stakeholders".

The associations's chair, Simon Milton, said officials should not 'hide behind impenetrable jargon and phrases'. He asked : "Why do we have to have coterminous, stakeholder engagement', when we could just 'talk to people' instead ?"

Well said, Simon. I too ask the same question. If I have the power, I will also pass law in India to abolish a whole lot of words, starting from the 'empowerment', 'stakeholders', 'capacity building'. To illustrate this point, here is a nice cartoon :

Why can't we talk simple ?! I have already written about searching being called 'Research'. Similarly, people do 'Desk Research' before starting their consultancy assignment. It is nothing but reading all the documents.

Instead of saying 'zero tolerance policy', we can simply say, "No..No .. NO ". Instead of saying "Local government's poor fiscal policy on aqua-surface infrastructure projects", we can easily say, "the Panchayat spent money unnecessarily on a bridge which collapsed".

There is another frightening thing. When such jargons are translated into Tamil. Just imagine what dreadful effect there will be, when lofty ideals like Empowerment, decentralisation, paradigm shift etc. get translated into Tamil. It is atrocious when people do not understand that sentence construction is different in our languages. In English, it may be okay to say 'We must have an understanding" as much as "We must understand it". But, in Tamil, we must only say, நாம் இதை புரிந்து கொள்ள வேண்டும். But, our NGO friends always say நமக்கு இது பற்றிய புரிதல் வேண்டும். Such things make even simple ideas complicated.

PS :

Read a cartoon recently where the son asks his father, "Dad, when will I become the fully owned subsidiary of you and mom ?"