Popular Complaints

Councillors love to complain. It's in our blood. One of the favourite complaints of councillors is Jargon. They (we?) just hate it.

Now I'm all for this - because it's important that you make yourself as clear as possible. If a member of the public hasn't read hundreds of council papers and been involved in all the background work then it's unlikely that they're going to understand what LSP's and CDRP's stand for or are.

But I'm concerned that a drive towards reducing jargon will make it difficult to communicate anything with any substance. Sometimes "Jargon" - especially acronyms or New Labour euphemisms are worthless (like how our parking wardens have become "civil enforcement officers")

But sometimes it's important that we use new terminology to encapsulate new ideas. Like "3rd Sector": we need some way to terming a group of organisations are so vitel to what we do. We just have to be careful about creating them, and use them in moderation.