Bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo tops banned words list

Editor's Notes

Our city editor recently handed a list of about 100 banned words to the reporters at their weekly meeting.

First they groaned. Some muttered under their breath. A few argued.

How in the world were they supposed to write about a feasibility study without using the word feasibility? How could they cover a City Council meeting without facilities, mitigations, allocations, implementations and infrastructure? How could they ever quote another public official?

New rule: No sentence will stagger under the weight of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo. Reporters will throw out all those tired, poor, wretched words, yearning to be rewritten.

Take vehicle, for instance. Why write about a vehicle found in the canal when you can be so much more specific by calling it a car or a pickup? Same goes for juveniles. That’s cop talk: Call them teens instead. And in case you find yourself writing the word utilize, don’t. Trade it for three letters — use.

Every reporter who takes a beat at a newspaper knows that it has its own language to be translated. Sources from school officials to cops, lawyers, politicians, coaches and bureaucrats use languages steeped in jargon, and if reporters aren’t careful, they’ll pick up the same shopworn vocabularies.

Thankfully, some public agencies are starting to recognize the problem. Contra Costa County supervisors, for instance, took a brilliant anti-acronym stand last month and banished alphabet soup like EIR (Environment Impact Report), ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments) and RFP (Request for Proposals) from all speech and written materials. Only commonly used acronyms such as FBI or BART are acceptable.

Supervisor John Gioia of Richmond said he was inspired by the board of commissioners in Kitsap County, Wash., which fines anyone $1 who uses bureaucratic acronyms. The money goes to charity.

“I think it’s important for government officials to speak in English,” the Kitsap board’s chairwoman said.

In the same way, we think it’s important that people understand what government is up to, so our job at the newspaper is to make what we write more understandable. We need to avoid clichés (like the plague), and jargon (like best practices), which are ho-hum to readers.

So the list of banned words is an attempt to strive for language that’s fresh, never arcane. Strong, active verbs. Meaningful nouns. Rarely used adjectives and adverbs.

If you see any of the following words in our copy, feel free to point them out to us. (Note that this is just a partial list, because I don’t want your eyes to glaze over completely.)

Banned: Action plan, assess, at-risk, benchmarking, capacity, continuum, empowerment, extrapolate, incentivize, initiative, joint resources, leverage, paid personnel, residence, stakeholders, sustained injuries, juveniles.

If you have any nominations of your own, send them my way to add to the banned word list. And if you have any pristine, unsullied replacement words, ship them over, too.