The words we use say almost as much as the ideas behind them. Let’s “blue-sky the concept”.

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Today the Local Government Association in the UK has announced another battle: not against flytipping, or anti-social behaviour or people who fill their recycling bins too high, but against its own members. The LGA has declared war on local government jargon. They have come out against anti-simple language. The chair of the LGA, Margaret Eaton, told BBC News online: “The public sector must not hide behind impenetrable jargon and phrases.”

Helpfully, the BBC give us examples of the offending words: why say “benchmarking”, when you mean “measure”, or “seedbed” when “idea” will do, or use a euphemism like “slippage” when you mean “delay”? And this is even before you get onto such excrescences as “Blue sky thinking”, “predictors of beaconicity”, “Horizon scanning”, or “Coterminosity”.

It’s not just local government subject to this vocabulary. In 1996 an American physicist, Alan Sokal, submitted an article to Social Text, a cultural studies journal¹. The article examined the way in which objective science was actually a construct of a “ruling hegemony”, ring fenced with oppressive language structures and patriarchal vocabularies: phrases such as “privileged epistemological status”, “refutation of … authoritarianism and elitism”, and “static ontological categories” were bandied around. The problem was, it was a spoof. Sokal had submitted the article as a parody, troubled by the “decline in the standards of intellectual rigour” in the humanities. He took the jargon of the discipline and turned it on itself. He was roundly condemned for being so dismissive of the academic hospitality afforded him. His point, however, remains. Jargon is a closed and self-referential language, and easy to parody.

So why do people insist on using it, in academia or government? Brian Martin of the University of Wollongong² nailed it fifteen years ago, when he pointed out that jargon has two functions. It polices “the boundaries of disciplines and specialities”, acting as a toll on “those who attempt to cross an intellectual border” and it also separates the particular area of work from the general public, giving it a distinction and a status: you might think my job is easy, but, to be honest, you can see how hard it is by the whole different language you have to speak in order to do it.

The Christian church doesn’t escape the temptations of jargon either. Much of our conversations go on in “Christianese”, with various denominational dialects: “So I said to the DDO that I can only persaude the PCC for so long, before I have to take it to the APCM, and he told me to ‘offer it up’”. It is a temptation to be heartily resisted. An Italian warned us about the dangers of jargon years ago: “preach the Gospel,” he said, and “if necessary, use words.” And St Francis knew what he was talking about: he, if you would allow me, “walked the talk”.

1. Alan D. Sokal, ‘Transgressing the boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity’, Social Text, 46/47 (Spring/Summer 1996) [↩]
2. ‘Secret passwords at the gate of knowledge,’ The Australian, 23 September 1992, p. 16 [↩]