A.O.B.
From buzzword to fuzzword
Published: 08 October 2008
‘There would have been a time for such a word’, quoth Macbeth.
The ‘word’ Macbeth thought untimely was ‘dead’, which was what Lady Macbeth had just become. Evil old bat that she was, her husband loved her and wished she ‘should have died hereafter’.
‘Macbeth’ itself has become a tainted word, superstitious thespians preferring to speak of ‘the Scottish play’.
Words, like people, have their day. Oddly, the people set in authority above us are quick to jump on the bandwagon of a new buzzword, yet slow to notice when the wagon’s wheels start coming off. That’s when a buzzword becomes a fuzzword.
By ‘fuzzword’ I mean a word that has been around so long it has been drained of meaning, or worse still, tainted by subsequent association.
An example: for years now, the town hall has sought to ape Ten Downing Street, so speaks not of committee-members or chairmen and women. Instead, we have ‘Cabinet members’ and even ‘Portfolio Holders’.
These magnificoes and their officials (‘Directorate of This and That’) soon forget how to talk human. They begin parroting the tired clichés of Ten Downing Street: policies are inevitably ‘robust’; these policies ‘address’ things, usually ‘issues around’ something-or-other, for the benefit not of you or me, but of ‘stakeholders’. Does it matter?
Yes, The Governance Partnership would argue yes, it does.
It matters, because if you must speak or write from default position, you must be careful of the setting you select.
If a local authority gets it wrong, fuzzwords damage the ‘local’ component, and therefore some of the ‘authority’. That’s why The Governance Partnership offers training, mentoring and editing/writing services.
When chasing central government funding, a local authority may have to speak Circumlocution, the code in which Whitehall and Westminster conduct business. But the ‘locals’, the authority’s residents and council-tax payers, neither speak nor write like civil servants or politicians. So why, in dealings with its own people, should a local authority cling on to vanities such as ‘Cabinets’ and ‘Portfolios’ – long after people have ceased to respect the real thing at Westminster?
As well as MPs, we now have MEPs, national parliaments (England excepted) and may yet have Regional Assemblies. Over three-quarters of legislation is now imported from Brussels, under a system that denies us the referendum we were promised. MPs accordingly have much-diminished power, inside the Commons or out of it. They are becoming more like travel agents, directing aggrieved constituents towards the appropriate part of the forest of unelected quangoes.
In the maze we now live in, who does the citizen first turn to for help?
It used to be, and in many cases still is, the local authority. To use a phrase that is somewhere between buzzwords and fuzzwords, the local authority ‘can make a difference’. If so, why not keep it that way, and speak the same language as the people.
Keep it ‘local’, protect the ‘authority’.
Ross Davies is a partner in The Governance Partnership.