going where?

This morning, I rise from my slumbers to hear a radio interview with some businessman.

The interviewer asks him what the situation is like "going forward".

Apart from sounding like the title of a Christian boy band, it just sounds plain bad.

"Going forward, into the second quarter, we see earnings increase by..."

And while we're on the subject of increases - in my old public sector life, people started to use an awful word - "uplift"

As in "We envisage an uplift in our funding over the next four years".

In this context uplift means "get more" or even "increase", but for some reason these people have to invent a new, baffling and ugly word for it.

Uplift sounds like something you might require from a bra.

Keep it simple.

Will

the man who sells the sandwiches

Just arrived back from a train trip to the Midlands to see a client.

It was a relatively painless journey until bloke running the buffet car introduced himself over the Tannoy as the "retail services manager".

He's probably been told to "deliver" retail services to the passengers.

I was confronted with the cursed word "delivery" at one other point during the day. It seems that nowadays everyone delivers something. In fact they don't have do deliver something concrete, they can just deliver an idea - sorry a "concept".

In my life the only people that deliver are my postman and my milkman.

Keep it simple.

Will

literacy and what?

Literacy and Numeracy

Last week I asked my daughter which subjects she liked at school. She paused before telling me that she enjoyed something called numeracy. She's only six years old!

Literacy - I assume this is what we used to call English. You know, reading and writing.

Numeracy - Erm, maths?

What next..?

non-contemporary events - history

culture and landmass - geography

competitive and non competitive physical exertion within a structured and formalised setting - PE

And another thing, Literacy is a noun that means the ability to read and write and I couldn't even find numeracy in the damned dictionary!

Will

OK, lets go..

A plea for simplicity...to rediscover what plain English can do.

I've just spent two years working in the public sector dealing with a baffling array of language. Nouns that became verbs and then swapped back again, strange new isms, using at least four or five words where one is quite sufficient.

I always found it amazing that organisations that waffled on about something called diversity and inclusion - don't ask - used language that the average Joe couldn't understand.

Even worse, they expected me to write that stuff too.

So this is an occasional blog, dedicated to the plain daft as well as the frustrating. Like the woman who once asked me where she could "source" some water - I should have pointed to the ground, or the time that I learned that I lived near something called a "rural hub".

Every so often I'll give you some bits of jargon, together with their plain English equivalent. Or I'll just rant. We'll see what happens. Send me your own examples. Together we might just make the world a simpler and better place.

Will