Coming into work on the bus this morning, I had two ideas for my blog entry as ‘blog mistress’ (oh why not….my niece used to be a web-mistress for Playboy magazine so am only carrying on the tradition). Then I read Brennan’s piece. I am going to stick to one of my original ideas, as there is a sort of a link – tenuous – to do with the use of language, what is bad and what is good. I promise to be very brief…..
I spend my life these days in a kind of Tower of Babel, with various languages, and forms of my own language, surrounding me. At home, I hear Swedish, English and very occasionally, Danish. At work, Danish, various forms of English, Chinese, Polish, Icelandic…. In the laundry I hear Serbian, Arabic, Urdu, Polish again…. On the bus, Finnish, Danish, Russian and Swedish again. In many ways, this is fun, playing ‘spot the language’ and giving students a fright when you understand a word in Bulgarian. Sometimes it is tiring (after a full day of meetings in Danish, the last thing I want to do is watch TV in Danish), sometimes frustrating.
Today on the bus I heard British English – hoorah! Except….I could not understand a word she was saying. Actually, that is not true. I understood the words but not the meaning, as she was discussing some piece of medical research with someone else going to a conference at the Rigshospital. Her language consisted purely of jargon associated with her field and was thus incomprehensible to the rest of us. Jargon is, I would argue, essential for discussions of a technical or specialist nature. The common language of experts, one could say. Some jargon grows out of a need to abbreviate and simplify terms and routines in organisations. My favourite one from my old job at ‘Caly’ (ie Glasgow Caledonian University) was the Ribena Student. No, we did not take recalcitrant or annoying students and blend them into a sweet blackcurrant drink, these were students who were ‘registered but not in attendance’ ie rbnia or Ribena (meaning students who had failed lots of times but who we could not kick out as they still had one attempt at something). The shorthand made sense to us, the insiders.
However, jargon sometimes gets a bit out of hand (and here we come to the problem of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ again), particularly when it becomes ‘management speak’. Again, a favourite from my previous job was the ‘cascade of briefs’ from the Principal’s office. No, he did not throw his dirty underwear down on us. The phrase referred to a communication line, downwards from the top, of ‘interesting’ information. In many forms of contemporary English, there are many over-used words used in peculiar contexts (I once successfully challenged a student to get ‘overarching’ and ‘underpinning’ in a sentence) and certainly many ghastly phrases (‘I’ll have to run that idea up the flag pole after putting it on the back burner and then we can take a holistic cradle-to-grave approach to this particular challenge’). What upsets us about these phrases I think, is not so much the ‘jargon effect’, as the associations this type of speech has for us, of the idiot boss who has read too many airport management books. Instead of making complex issues simple, they blur and confuse, and make us question what is going on.
So, jargon is good in context. Management speak is always bad. Am I right or wrong? And why is it important to even mention it? One reason is that we have lots of international students with varying commands of English and to whom we have to make things clear. Using ‘management speak’ in this context can lead to misunderstandings and confusion, while certain jargon phrases have to be explained (especially those translated from Danish). At the end of the day, our stakeholders need that level of granularity to leverage their talents and aim for the strategic staircase…..yes, your guess is as good as mine as to what that means!
Oh – an idea shower – the new term for ‘brain storming’ which the PC brigade thinks has too many associations with epilepsy.
And I promise a blog on some multimedia topic tomorrow!