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It is true that all industries have their own jargon understandable only to those in the know.
In the main, this doesn’t matter provided the words and phrases are used within those business circles. When I first went to work, I had to learn the jargon of shipping pretty quickly in order to understand what people were talking about around me.
However, it seemed to me that once accountants and MBAs appeared on the scene, taking over from those who had been in a business from the bottom upwards, they introduced a whole raft of meaningless waffle that baffled a good many of us. So I naively thought that when I retired I had left all that behind me, but no, I constantly come up against people who think that by peppering their conversations with the latest management-babble they appear more knowledgeable than they really are.
The Local Government Association has published their latest list of ‘impenetrable phrases’ used by government and local council bodies. The words include: wellderly, disbenefits, under-capacitated, tonality, trialogue, clienting, synergies, contestability and mainstreaming. Heaven alone knows what these mean.
The bit of jargon that fascinated me most was ‘goldfish bowl facilitated conversation’. For the life of me I can’t work out what this could possibly mean. Does it mean a discussion round a table so that everyone present can see each other? I don’t know and, frankly, can’t be bothered to find out.
The Chair of the LGA said, ‘Why do we have to have a ‘webinar trialogue for the wellderly' when the public sector could just talk about caring for the elderly instead?’ She’s got that right!
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It is true that all industries have their own jargon understandable only to those in the know.
In the main, this doesn’t matter provided the words and phrases are used within those business circles. When I first went to work, I had to learn the jargon of shipping pretty quickly in order to understand what people were talking about around me.
However, it seemed to me that once accountants and MBAs appeared on the scene, taking over from those who had been in a business from the bottom upwards, they introduced a whole raft of meaningless waffle that baffled a good many of us. So I naively thought that when I retired I had left all that behind me, but no, I constantly come up against people who think that by peppering their conversations with the latest management-babble they appear more knowledgeable than they really are.
The Local Government Association has published their latest list of ‘impenetrable phrases’ used by government and local council bodies. The words include: wellderly, disbenefits, under-capacitated, tonality, trialogue, clienting, synergies, contestability and mainstreaming. Heaven alone knows what these mean.
The bit of jargon that fascinated me most was ‘goldfish bowl facilitated conversation’. For the life of me I can’t work out what this could possibly mean. Does it mean a discussion round a table so that everyone present can see each other? I don’t know and, frankly, can’t be bothered to find out.
The Chair of the LGA said, ‘Why do we have to have a ‘webinar trialogue for the wellderly' when the public sector could just talk about caring for the elderly instead?’ She’s got that right!
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