Two points:-

1. Could the phrase ‘negative growth’ please be abolished? There is no such thing. The economy has not ‘experienced two consecutive quarters of negative growth’. For two quarters running, the economy has shrunk.

2. Not only does Orwell’s fourth rule about not using the passive simplify text and make it easier to follow. People also use the passive to evade responsibility. ‘The decision was taken to ………’. No. Someone or some group of people decided to ….. .

‘I am instructed to advise you …’. No. Either ‘X has told me to tell you …… ‘, or ‘I am telling you but would prefer to evade responsibility for doing so.’

There are occasions to use the passive. An example, is where one wants to keep the same subject for two successive verbs, ‘Parliament passed 7 minor bills and was then prorogued’. But there are not many such occasions.

Plenty of jargon here:
“Focus leaflets” (many leaflets not called Focus and meaningless to many outside the party)
“clapped out”
“pensioned off” (arguable this one)
“trots out”

Difficult, unless he was a contortionist …

Phrases like ‘going forward’ are seriously irritating to many people, including Lucy Kelloway, and I wish they could be stamped out. I heard a radio interview with Lord Coe and he used the phrase 4-5 times within 10 minutes. Why do people act in such a parrot-like way? New words and phrases seem to spread, like an epidemic until it reaches screaming pitch. It is not jargon on the whole – jargon are specialised terms used in medicine, sociology, engineering or any specialist profession. It avoids the use of ‘thingumyjig’ and ‘widget’. ‘Going forward’ has replaced ‘in the future’ – a phrase with a pedigree as long long as it is noble. ‘Future’ is a fine word, full of resonances and even emotion. Corporations like to wring this sort of thing out of words except the idea of progress and exclude any hint of negativity, existing or not. Business-speak also has ‘one must move on’. Business-speak seems to want to deracinate ordinary language, like changing a mature cheddar into a Kraft cheese slice.

Car driving seemed to inspire many of the phrases

Lets just park that idea.

We need get off the motorway and onto the A roads.

Remember, it’s corporate.

Etc.

Strictly speaking no one “requires” Mozart, or Picasso, or Dickens (all of whom can be pretty “impenetrable” when the mood takes them) but that doesn’t mean the world would be a better place without them.

Stephen Fry speaks so much better than me on the subject of “unnecessary”, but it’s enough to say that it’s often times the very unnecessary bit that make something fun.

There is a place for more simplistic language but is a place for the type of over-complicated sentences you decry too. Can’t we be a bit more, well, Liberal and celebrate both?

I agree with Alex and Alix that the original article is hopelessly confused about what jargon is. There is some overlap, but I think it’s important that jargon and cliché are different things. Jargon is almost always unimaginative and inaccessible, but most clichés are widely understood – even if some have stopped functioning as metaphors and become ‘sayings’ (whether meaningful or not).

The main thing I object to here is the suggestion that talk of ‘families’ is jargon. It plainly isn’t, although ‘hard-working families’ is probably a political cliché. (most successful political language probably turns to cliché in the end – it is, after all, written to be endlessly repeated)

It seems to me that Nick Clegg and others are trying to find a liberal way to talk about families – and to use that word in an inclusive way. I don’t agree with people who think that’s the wrong thing to do, but their grounds for objection surely aren’t that it’s jargon?

Family is, in politics, a contested idea – and I think it’s right that we should try to reclaim it. I’m not sure we’ve got it consistently right yet, but the families we talk about should be quite a sharp contrast with ‘hard-working families’. It has always seemed to me that the point of that phrase was to appeal to people’s sense of desert, partly by implying toughness on some others who in Victorian terms would be the ‘undeserving poor’ (perhaps also the undeserving rich…but New Labour hasn’t been so good at that).

Aren’t we trying to talk about families in a way which doesn’t divide people, but makes them think about their own interests in a broader way?

It’s an interesting discussion, but some of the reaction to our leaders using a word which is plainly a fully functioning, useful part of the language strikes me as odd and depressingly uncharitable about their intentions. All politicians do talk about families, yes. But all politicians also talk about freedom, fairness and a whole host of other terms which don’t offend the Liberator Collective’s staunchly liberal but grumpy-old-man-ish instincts.

You are labouring under the delusion that creativity and simplicity are mutually exclusive. Orwell was a master of plain English yet was one of our country’s most creative writers.

I am glad you support creativity and fun and a good turn of phrase. All of these can be achieved using straightforward language. None require unwarranted or inpenetrable verbiage.

I’m sure we can agree about the undesirability of unnecessary verbiage. But I had a specific example in mind – the use of “ask” as a noun, which is on your proscribed list. That seems to me to be a legitimate example of linguistic evolution. It fills an empty space. “It’s a big ask” is significantly different from “It’s a big demand” (too accusatory) and “It’s a big request” (too weak). And, since the latter two already act as nouns and verbs, there’s no logical reason why “ask” shouldn’t be pressed into the same service. It may be a little self-consciously “trendy” now, I grant you, but give it a couple of years and I’d happily advocate putting it on a Focus leaflet.

However, I’m starting to wonder why you’re getting irritated to be honest – that’s what your tone is now suggesting. There was me thinking I’d found someone to have a nice chat with about linguistic usage, but it seems you’d rather just shut down the conversation. Ho hum.

I’m not in favour of jargon.

I am in favour of creativity and fun and a good turn of phrase.

You quote as an “objective” truth that everything that isn’t the simplest possible way of saying something is jargon.

You then claim to be at the same time against jargon in favour of creativity and fun and a good turn of phrase, but that anyone else who’s in favour of creativity and fun and a good turn of phrase is in favour of jargon.

You are, in your own simple term, talking bollocks.

Make it Happen suffers from many problems but plain English isn’t one of them. Inserting ‘going forward’ into the text wouldn’t have made it any better; stripping out ‘struggling families’ might have.

But forgive me if my tiny brain now can’t understand your simple argument that you’re in favour of creativity and that, at the same time, everything but the simplest possible way of expressing something is jargon, which you’re attacking.

“‘Could this have been expressed more simply without communication suffering in the process?’ If the answer is ‘Yes’, then the probability is that one is faced with a piece of jargon.”

Look, Simon, you quoted it. You agree with it. It’s clear what it means. And it’s mad nonsense that goes completely the other way of what you’ve just said. You and Mr Hudson argue in favour of creativity and comedy and condemn it as jargon. You can’t have it both ways. You are not a defender of “bollocks”, but a practitioner of it.

Oh, wait! I’ve got it. It’s more from 1984, isn’t it? Where’s that definition:
“Doublethink – the act of simultaneously accepting as correct two mutually contradictory beliefs.”