I expect you have all moved on by now but as someone who makes their living from writing (journalism, tv, etc) what makes my blood boil about local authority or most other needless jargon in particular is the way it is used to over-complicate straightforward propositions. It becomes a lingua franca for a certain kind of bureaucrat which at once seeks to exclude everyone outside that bureaucratic loop and at the same time apparently enhances the status of the person using the language- until, of course, someone points out, emperor’s new clothes style, that all this fancy polysyllabism (see? I can do it too) does not actually add anything at all to the meaning of the words that are in every day use. Oh, and it is aesthetically ugly into the bargain.

Using long words for the sake of it is not the preserve of clever people, Neville. On the contrary, it is a flimsy refuge for those who are so uncertain of their own language that they do not dare use it without dressing it up in those emperor’s new clothes. A bit like the emperor, they end up sounding even more absurd.

There’s one other point here which needs to be made. English is an incredibly rich language which draws its strength from its many diverse roots. Latin and Greek and the Romance languages, which is where a lot of the longer words come from, are fine. But the shorter chunkier words from Saxon and Germanic roots (dog, book, do, see) are just as good. IN fact, I’m rather a fan of single syllables. There is nothing “better” about using the word “herbivore” instead of saying “an animal which eats plants.” Nor, to come back to where we came in, is there anything clever in itself about saying “coterminous” when you mean “ends in the same place”.

That phrase in the post headline is a perfect example.

“Coterminous stakeholder engagement.” Good grief! And if that’s not patronizing, I don’t know what is.

Heh! ‘Engage’ is one of the banned words…

Armin, I was the same: no idea at all what that word meant. I looked it up, too, and I still don’t understand it.

As with all plain english things, I’m in two minds. I mean, we all hate lazy and incomprehensible management speak and over use of jargon helps no one - especially in stakeholder engagement, whether coterminous or not.

But there is, I think, an argument to be made around dumbing down, isn’t there? If we make all our communications completely understandable for people with the reading age of an 11 year old (or whatever the frankly pathetic average is in the UK) then where is the encouragement for anyone to actually improve their ability to read? Isn’t the fact that Armin was motivated to get his dictionary out and discover a new word a good thing?