Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

Wednesday, 25th March 2009

My husband shook his head in a sorrowful, dismissive fashion and said: ‘You’ve lived a very sheltered life.’ All I had done was to ask what cascading meant in the sense that the Local Government Association wanted to ban. Anyone would have thought I’d asked him the meaning of rimming or some such word with which if one lacked familiarity it would be better not to make an acquaintance.

I had been perusing the LGA’s list of 200 items of jargon we should do without. Some are dreary management-speak: blue-skies thinking, challenge (meaning ‘problem’), or synergies. Some are politicians’ clichés: menu of options, revenue stream, going forward. But some I simply could not fathom. These include conditionality, coterminosity, place shaping, and cascading. These words have meanings but no apparent applicability to the contexts in which they are used.

I came across a publication from the Institute of Local Government Studies called ‘Strategic Service Partnership and Boundary-Spanning Behaviour: A Study of Multiple, Cascading Policy Windows’. It was ‘a thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of Doctor of Philiosphy’ [sic]. I trust this was attained.

Cascading policy windows sound dangerous, all spurting jets and broken glass. But the only meaning of cascading (apart from the literal) that had caught the eye of the OED by 1989 was a metaphor used to describe relegation of old buses by stages to successively less exacting uses.

I know that jargon can be everyday language for those engaged in specialised tasks. To a wheelwright, the nave, felloes, strakes and box are current coin. But wheelwrights do not impose council tax and use it to print impenetrable ideology.

I am not alone in boggling at the lexicon of socio-management. One example of fashionable bureaucratic cliché at the moment, across the piece, died before birth as a metaphor. Despite its popularity, it is often misinterpreted as a figure from skiing — across the piste. Oddly enough it replaces an equally obscure metaphor, also from America, across the board, which has nothing to do with chess, but comes from combination betting on horse races, where the odds would be displayed on a board.

I wish the LGA luck, but I fear they will have no more success in weaning bureaucrats on to sensible language than parents have had in persuading teenagers not to wear their jeans hanging round their thighs.

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