#oneaday, Day 58: Bullshit Bingo

The school I work at (until this coming Friday, fact fans) recently had its updated OfSTED report published. For the uninitiated (and/or American) amongst you, this is the report on how "good" (sarcastic air quotes mine, not theirs) the school is. At the last inspection, shortly before I arrived at the school in November, the school was judged to be "inadequate" and in need of "special measures" for various reasons that I won't bore you with now. The most recent report claimed that we were making "satisfactory" progress towards making the "required improvements" put forth in the "action plan".

The crowning glory of the report, though, was the phrase "stem the tide of falling underachievement", something which apparently we are doing. Now, I don't know quite how many negatives are in that statement but I'm sure there's the wrong number. Surely "falling underachievement" is a good thing, so you wouldn't want to "stem the tide" of it? Perhaps they meant "stem the tide of falling achievement", but that doesn't sound quite right either. And I'm pretty sure it's not "stem the tide of achievement", since that is how the school got into this mess in the first place, albeit not intentionally.

There's only one response to things like this: "BULLSHIT!"

It astonishes me quite how much people get away with peddling this nonsensical use of language under the pretence of it being "formal". Those of you who follow me on Twitter may remember what I did to the company that supposedly "manages" the estate of apartment blocks that I live on. I went through their letter and corrected it in red pen, then posted it back to them. The results are here, if you missed it first time:

I think I was quite generous with a D-.

Then, of course, you get anyone who talks about social media "professionally", or at least likes to think they do. They use words like "monetization strategy" and "leverage" to mean "how they are going to make money" and "use". What is wrong with "how they make money" and "use"? We've been using language like that for years. Why does the technological age suddenly have to bring in a bunch of new and meaningless jargon? And, while we're on, since when did the word "product" – without a trailing "s" – become a plural?

Politics are no better. Listen to our less-than-illustrious boring fart of a leader Gordon Brown speak and all you'll hear is string after string of meaningless waffle – so utterly devoid of actual content that by the time he reaches the end of his speech you've completely forgotten what the question was and you'll agree with him just to shut him up. The Tories aren't any better. Listen to Cameron in all his shiny-headed glory and all you get is repetitive catchphrases, empty promises and a slightly larger urge to slit your wrists than when you started. If I had to pick one of them to listen to, I'd pick Cameron, but it's a close-run thing, and with either of them I'd be chewing down on the cyanide capsules if I didn't have other things to distract me with.

I like plain speaking. The last few jobs I've applied for I've taken this approach and communicated with the potential employers or clients as an actual human being. I'm not "passionate" about things that I'm not really passionate about. I'm not "confident and enthusiastic". I'm not "a team player". I'm not… you know, all the other idiotic things that people only ever write when applying for a job and eventually get found out as being a liar. I'm Pete. I'm a human. I speak English. I don't speak jargon.