“A picture is worth a thousand words…, “ an idea that is universally recognised, frequently used in business, but not often seen where it might have most impact – Senior Executive/Board meetings. Descriptive text still dominates most senior level reports, often using ‘corpspeak’; a peculiar form of jargon developed by people like *The Head of […]
The Listening Service. Busting Jargon, Including People and Improving the Tweets
I go to lots of conferences and seminars. The result of this, (apart from the addiction to buffet food) is that I now speak a different language – ‘Jargy Jargy’ or Jargon, “the specialist language for a specific activity or group of people” (I’ve gone on about this before). If you stop and think about it […]
“Poor Historian”? How the Geriatrics Profanisaurus exposes the dark side of Jargon.
What do you get when you combine; Geriatric Medicine, Profanity and a Thesaurus? Obviously, it’s the bleedin excellent ‘Geriatrics Profanisaurus’, written by Professor David Oliver on the British Geriatrics Society blog. Well worth reading (including the comments). David is also a Visiting Fellow at the Kings Fund and has written some impressive material for them […]
Helping without being directly helpful – Mandarin English and Sabotage
Many years ago in a galaxy far far away I ran a series of improvement workshops with a big organisation. The final session was about developing an action plan and things were going swimmingly. The group had ‘taken ownership’, identified ‘SMART outcomes’, developed ‘success criteria’ and set out a ‘monitoring and evaluation framework’. What could possibly […]
Jargon. A tool of exclusion, efficient technical language or just the ‘cheeping of birds’?
My last post about meetings led to a bit of a discussion about jargon. It’s something that’s despised by many people, but has probably been used by most of us on occasions . So I’m being particularly carefull to avoid using it in this post. It’s worth having a think about why jargon exists and […]
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