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.
Words such as "empowerment" and "synergies" are on the Local Government Association's hit list and perhaps rightly so. Orwell took aim at euphemisms and unwieldy metaphors that he felt were used to make the dirty business of politics appear more savory than it truly was. But this approach that we have just seen in action hides a premise that seems less tenable when we look more closely at it. It assumes that language as it is, or as it recently was, avoided all the problems that the Local Government Association and Orwell are attempting to tackle. Under this model, English, as it was, is neutral with respect to power. Only recently have we begun to try to smuggle political Trojan Horses into our speech in an effort to subvert political common sense and disrupt the natural order of things. The only kind of linguistic activism that we ought to conscience is the corrective variety: the kind that restores English to its former glory.
But this cannot be right. There is no Archimedean point from which to begin this kind of analysis or any action to correct it. It might be the case that recent developments have politicized our language to a greater degree than before but even this has to be demonstrated. As Orwell demonstrates, this is not a new problem; we have been lamenting the state of English for generations. This particular kind of conservatism that uncritically lauds the past as vaunted and the present as fallen is simply curmudgeonly. Orwell's argument is truly subtle and the Local Government Association's list of 100 banned words may actually improve the state of communication between the state's branches and the citizenry. But this case must be made. Linguistic innovation is not always bad.
The reason these arguments are not made is because the backlash against "political correctness" has led many to be suspicious of any attempt to rid the language of offensive terms. But this blanket distrust of neologisms is no more useful than a blanket trust of them would be. English is a tool to communicate and it operates in a number of fashions. Our words don't just pick out objects in the world; they embody systems of power and we must be mindful not to grandfather-in vestigial systems for fear of bringing about new ones. Words are powerful and we should respect their power to offend as well as to inspire. Assuming that none of us can be offended by a term because we simply oughtn't to let ourselves be, presumably out of respect for unbridled free speech, just does not reflect the world we actually live in. We must make the case for regulating or not regulating speech.
Buzzwords may be imprecise. But "buzzarguments" are moreso, not to mention more dangerous.
buzzwords
