Just Say No – To Jargon!

I don't understand the love affair that some people have with jargon, otherwise known as cliché, lingo, idiom, slanguage, buzzwords or, less charitably, as doublespeak, drivel, gibberish, mumbo jumbo, nonsense, gobbledygook, or weasel words.

Jargon is a thing of paradox – it can be used to include or exclude, and to communicate or stifle communication, and to paraphrase Don Watson's Death Sentences: How Clichés, Weasel Words and Management-Speak Are Strangling Public Language, it can render the complex simple, and the simple complex.

The UK's Plain English Campaign annually offers the Golden Bull Awards for jargon. The 2007 winner was the company Virgin Trains, which in responding to a question about why their website didn't show a particular price, said: "Moving forwards, we, as Virgin Trains, are looking to take ownership of the flow in question to apply our pricing structure, thus resulting in this journey search appearing in the new category-matrix format."

Confused? Who wouldn't be! (I think the answer means that the price will appear as soon as they update their site's search function.) The answer certainly didn't provide good customer service, which, in theory, was the whole point of the communication. It is, as Watson wrote concerning this type of writing, "…an example of what George Orwell described as anesthetic writing. You cannot read it without losing a degree of consciousness." And it is certainly an example of making the English language incomprehensible to those fluent in English!

Most familiar are the brief phrases. (Indeed, some jargonists pepper their speeches with a particular phrase, making it reminiscent of common fillers, such as "like" or "y'know.") The Boston Globe had a 27-page gallery featuring the most hated business jargon, of which a familiar example was: "'I have always despised thinking outside the box,' … 'yet I do enjoy the look on the faces to whom I point out that to 'Think outside of the box' is still thinking about the box.'"

And consider the irritation of a recruiter who wrote in to MedHunters' Dear Cindy column, pleading for people to stop using terms like "people person," "multi-tasking," and the above mentioned "thinking outside the box." It is not a good idea for an applicant to annoy or alienate the HR staff at the place s/he wishes to work.

Beyond annoyance and overuse, a November 6, 2006 BBC News article warned: "Needless jargon in the workplace is baffling employees and widening the divide between management and staff. … About a third of the 3,000 workers polled said they felt inadequate when wordy terms were needlessly used. Others believed bosses were being untrustworthy, or hiding something."

While jargon can be a useful (if overused) form of shorthand when all users understand what is being said, jargonists often don't bother to confirm that everyone does understand. Instead, they tend to assume that their audience has the same level of fluency in jargon that they do and the same appreciation of it. It is not necessarily so. A friend who has worked in education for years still cannot understand the "eduspeak" or, more negatively, "edu-babble," of her colleagues. These are people who work in the same field, in the same place, and who have the same level of education, and similar years of experience and type of experience. Imagine how much worse it could be between individuals whose levels or types of education were different, or whose backgrounds were different, or if some participants in the conversation were not proficient in English.

So for the sake of clarity and understanding, as the UK campaign says, let's all just speak plain English!

Discuss This Article

Have something you'd like to say? Tell us what you think! Read and post comments for this article.

Find a Job

Choose your career:

MedHunters is the world's biggest healthcare job board. Our job directory has 18,008 jobs with 2,507 hospitals and other direct employers.

We want you to find your next job on MedHunters. Need Help? Call us at 1-888-884-8242, email us at info@medhunters.com or sign up now.