Someone recently informed me that the British Local Government Association had produced a 100 item long list of words that are not to be uttered by any local administration in the United Kingdom or anyone within them. Your first reaction to this might be to lament that, even as the genius of George "seven dirty words you can never say on TV" Carlin passes away, his quest to end censorship through ridicule has been dealt another prudish blow. However, the terms on this list are not offensive in this controversial respect but are a good deal more banal.
The stated goal is to eradicate, from official usage, certain terms which have been deemed to be buzzwords, i.e. words that appear to communicate a particular idea in a sophisticated manner to the reader but, instead, confuse and annoy through their imprecision. A noble goal: surely? Who wouldn't want to prevent our already besieged language from sinking further into meaninglessness by standing up for the good ol' fashioned worth of words? And where better to erect a vanguard than at the highest political levels of one of the English-speaking world's major countries?
George Orwell had a similar motivation when he wrote his now famous essay "Politics and the English Language." He roundly rejected the notion that the continued abuse of English was as thoroughly modern as the automobile or the airplane and as inevitable as the social changes these inventions were bringing about. Instead, he believed that we could collectively act to retain the significance of our lexicon by correcting our own non-ideal use and acting aspirationally toward improvement. We English-speakers may not have a French-style academy that regulates the content of our tongue, but we are not, therefore, necessarily doomed to race to the bottom of the lexical barrel.
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