can you make that clear?

A month ago, E&T published a feature commenting on the deterioration of the English language in the management sector. This article proved to be so popular that we´ve started a discussion forum on the IET website devoted to the subject. You may have read an article in E&T back in May called The language of business the business of language´. It was an important piece by a British novelist claiming that some sectors of the English language are deteriorating so badly that it is starting to lose its accuracy. Nothing new in that, I´m afraid. George Orwell said as much in his classic essay ´Politics and the English Language´ way back in 1946. But what particularly interested me about this article (and to judge from my inbox, many of you too) was the author´s claim that the business world must share the blame for this with other culprits (such as electronic text communication, the Internet and railway station announcers). More than that: the world of management has encouraged a new kind of language to evolve. It´s a language where jargon words get thrown together into phrases that are totally devoid of meaning, but nonetheless sound important. It´s called ´Management Speak´. The author of this piece, Mick Herron, made the serious point that the use of this coded and fashionable language is a hindrance to clarity of meaning. Many professions have evolved their own language it´s called ´ideolect´ in order to remove ambiguities from medical, legal or political complexities. It´s not always pleasant, and it can feel as though these professions are enclosing themselves with a barbed wire fence, but these ideolects at least have their roots in necessity. However, as Herron points out, management requires the opposite and needs to achieve clarity of communication through simplicity. The speech managers cobble together in order to make things sound grander than they really are, to borrow a phrase from Orwell, ´anaesthetises a portion of one´s brain´.