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The latest jargon that is just not sustainable
Felix Allen30.12.08
"SUSTAINABLE" is one of the year's most potentially damaging pieces of jargon, according to an annual guide to "newspeak".
In a bid to appear environmentally-friendly, government and companies are keen to proclaim the "sustainability" of anything from the cups in their office drinks machines to new housing estates and transport links, said the 2009 Lexicon of contemporary newspeak published by the Centre for Policy Studies thinktank. But the use of the term is often questionable and it has become robbed of meaning, warned the report's editor Bill Jamieson. It is "a word whose very looseness and lack of clarity makes it a perfect prefix for any activity where approval is sought," he said. But in many cases it is little more than "a vacuous buzzword thrown as an algae-covered bone to the Green lobby to drape an aura of public good around economic change".
Activities hailed as "sustainable" may be more harmful than alternatives, while asking business to pursue "sustainability" may stifle innovation, said the newspeak report, whose title echoes George Orwell's warning about Big Brother manipulation of words in his novel 1984.
WHAT THEY SAY AND WHAT THEY MEAN
Words and phrases singled out by the Lexicon as blights on the language, with its definition of their true meaning:
This is a sterile debate: I don't want to talk about this any more.
Anti-social behaviour: anything of which the Government does not approve.
Best practice: a procedure determined by a committee; ignorance of precedent.
Britishness: any combination of values which a politician wants to promote.
Consultation: invitation for comments before embarking on original plan.
Credit crunch: ready-made excuse for any budget overrun, delay in payment or additional £100 billion of additional borrowing required by Government.
Fast track: not allowing Parliament sufficient time to consider the implications of new legislation.
Leaving a lasting legacy: the next Government will pick up the bill.
National interest: reason for withholding embarrassing information.
Reader views (3)
It should be understood that a word without context might as well be without meaning. In the realms of significant socio-political, environmental and cultural debate it is critically important to define the meaning of words that carry or have been weighted with significance and meaning to many people. There is a truth to Orwellian analogy around this point, you cannot forget the cliches, 'actions speak louder than words', but it would be foolish indeed to forget the power that can be attributed to a single term, where connontation and sysmbolism that transcends generations and language barriers. One would hope that the position of politician would demand precise word choice, but often such care is oversighted by political mudslinging and emotive debate.
- Simon, Oxford UK
The examples above are not jargon, but clichés. True jargon is vocabulary used by specialists to communicate to other specialists. They are not comprehensible to outsiders but have very precise and well-defined meanings.
- Charles Siu, London UK
You could have mentioned that there is a long-standing and broad but quite clear definition of sustainability.
The Brundtland report says that something is sustainable if it "...meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" Needs means fundamental common needs, and future generations means just that - all future generations.
If making, use, and eventually entropy of that plastic coffee cup meets this definition then it is sustainable.
The 'corruption' of the word sustainable is not a corruption at all, it is simply an error in contextualising its use. Sustainability in the Green context means the most global level, the Gaia level. If corporations, politicians and others use it out of this context but implying Greenism then we Greenies simply pull their arguments apart in seconds, whether in open forums, on blogs, or through P2P, we are breaking down the hierarchy that allows newspeakers to get away with it.
So don't worry about newspeak, 'Get out fo the doorway, don't block up the halls...The old world is rapidly changin'
- Alastair Mcgowan, Hereford, UK
