He first used it in the Chambers’ Washington Report, criticising the Office of Price Stabilization for the bureaucratic language it used in a price order.

Milton had spent many frustrating hours trying to explain the order to his colleague, and eventually decided the maddening blend of “incomprehensibility, ambiguity, verbosity and complexity” needed a new word to describe it.

So he created one: bafflegab.

As he accepted his award, Smith was asked to define his new word succinctly. This is how he did it:

…multiloquence characterized by consummate interfusion of circumlocution or periphrasis, inscrutability, and other familiar manifestations of abstruse expatiation commonly utilized for promulgations implementing Procrustean determinations by governmental bodies.

It raises a laugh and it reminds me of Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby:

The identity of the official whose alleged responsibility for this hypothetical oversight has been the subject of recent discussion is not shrouded in quite such impenetrable obscurity as certain previous disclosures may have led you to assume; but not to put too fine a point on it, the individual in question is, it may surprise you to learn, one whom your present interlocutor is in the habit of defining by means of the perpendicular pronoun.

(Translation: “I did it”).

But there’s a serious point. Today’s jargon of ‘going forward’, ‘step change’, ‘facilitating’, ‘solutions’, ‘out-task’, ‘best practice’, ‘roll out’, ‘populus at large’, ‘outcomes’, ‘turnkey’, ‘client side’, ‘paradigm shift’ and so on is nothing more than the worst kind of bafflegab or gobbledygook.

And if your business is using it in print or online, you’re alienating customers.

But don’t just take my word for it – it’s what Michael Shanks, former chair of the National Consumer Council, has also discovered:

“Gobbledygook may indicate a failure to think clearly, a contempt for one’s clients, or more probably a mixture of both.”

So say it simply – if you appear to hold people in contempt, they won’t buy from you.

I think it’s this…

Slang adds humanity to our language. Jargon sterilises it.

Slang is like us. It’s witty, affectionate, cruel, dismissive and all the other things we like to be.

It’s pregnant with observation and abundant with humour. We relish it, improve it, parade it and unleash it.

Jargon does the opposite.

At its best it’s a precision tool. A way of paring down with exactitude the meaning of concepts and objects.

At its worst it exists to cloud meaning, disguise ignorance and stand proxy for thought or action.

Slang describes the butterfly. Jargon pins it to the display card or conceals it from view.

We laugh at jargon, but we collect slang for pleasure.

That’s why we publish books that make fun of phrases like ‘blue sky thinking’ and ‘push the envelope’.

And it’s why we buy books that collect together and savour phrases and definitions like this one.

slanging, n. ‘To exhibit any thing in a fair or market, such as a tall man or a cow with two heads, that’s called slanging, and the exhibiter is called the slang cull‘

So next time you hear some industry leader banging on about how awful today’s yoof slang is, take a look at his website.

If it’s full of ‘solutions’ and ‘strategic objectives’ then I’ve got only one word of advice.

Skadoosh.

It’s called keyword prediction (if it wasn’t, it is now).

I got the idea a couple of years ago. At that point, it became fashionable to call online marketing ‘digital marketing’.

That got me thinking.

It wasn’t going to be an easy job to get a good Google rank for ‘online copywriting’. So I nicked the jargon, adapted it and created a page that mentioned ‘digital copywriting’ a few times.

Bingo. Page one of Google almost immediately.

The only problem was that no-one was searching for ‘digital copywriting’. So I didn’t make a bean from all that cleverness.

Until now. It’s the second-most popular search term used by people visiting my site from Google.

Some of them have even paid me cash to write for them.

Which goes to show jargon has its uses after all.

So keep an eye on the people who sell things a bit like yours.

And if they come up with a particularly rotten bit of jargon, steal it.

Carefully.

You’ll get the traffic sooner or later.

And if the page you publish is written in nice, friendly English you won’t make the same mistake as the real jargonmongers – boring your customers all the way to the back button.

Most of them bring back painful memories of the time I spent working for charities, and the interminable meetings which sapped my will to live.

I can’t bear to paste the actual words into my blog – I want to be careful who I attract as readers – but here’s a couple of pictures of the list…

(Scroll to the bottom for the point I want to make).

And number 2…

The official news story makes this point:

Just as it would be impossible for two IT professionals to speak to each other without using technical talk, it would be impossible for public sector experts to avoid using a degree of jargon.

I disagree. Technical talk isn’t the same thing as jargon – though there is certainly jargon in the technical world. For example, ‘Gigabyte’ isn’t jargon – it’s a technical term. On the other hand, ‘workflow’ is jargon – it’s a horrible name for a process.

And that’s what I hate about so much of public sector jargon – it simplifies human beings and makes them part of a process. And when that process becomes the end in itself – as in so many goverment-imposed targets (waiting lists, class sizes, etc, etc) – the human beings get left out of the equation.

‘Wellderly’. ‘Citizen touchpoints’. ‘Social exclusion’. ‘Community engagement’. Words and phrases like these turn our lives, loves and problems into something mechanical, that can supposedly be repaired or altered by a machine-like process.

And if, like me, you’ve spotted that many officials use jargon to think and that it shapes their view of the world – then little wonder so many of us get trapped in the cogs.

Don’t you think, dear stakeholder?

I’ve worked as a copywriter for a big, American company for 4 years now. So I’m fluent in the language of ‘business speak’. (Or, as I’ve affectionately renamed it, Corporate ****. Fill in the blanks – you’ll be right.) But ‘ideation’ has recently moved up my own personal chart of words (is it even one of those?) which is just unnecessary. And ridiculous. And usually used by someone who’s not particularly clever to pretend that they are, in fact, rather clever.

Circle back, reach out… fall over

But the invitation to this session of ideating (sounds like it’ll hurt) is just the tip of the corporate-speak iceberg. I’ve ideated ‘against’ particular topics and ‘circled back’ on others. I’ve ’touched base by end of play’ and am often advised to ‘reach out’ to my fellow colleagues to ensure that we’re all ‘singing from the same song sheet’.

Seriously – some of these phrases just sound plain rude to me. Don’t even get me started on ‘low-hanging fruit’.

Luckily for me, the person I report to is the Plain English Campaign’s number one fan. Not only would I be laughed at if I started sentences with ‘Going forward…’ I think it could jeopardise my bonus.

So I’m encouraged to have fun with the barrage of unnecessary jargon that’s fired at me daily. Corporate Bingo is the best way to liven up a dull meeting – if we need to be ‘proactive’ about an issue, that’ll get us 10 points; if it’s an issue we need to ‘cascade’, that’s a 20. Let’s do a Mexican wave as an energiser to celebrate!

Synchrobloodymeshing

Laughing at these words and phrases, and the people who use them, certainly makes the working day more entertaining. (Best done inwardly, or not at all, if the CEO’s involved). I’ve started challenging my peers when they use convoluted language, and recently asked a colleague what he meant by ‘syncromeshing’. He wasn’t entirely sure.

But the one that takes the business biscuit, and which appeared in an email from someone fairly important a few weeks ago, concerned a problem that could’ve been disastrous but turned out not to be. It was, apparently, a ‘bat up our nightdress’.

I’m not sure whether that’s a good or a bad thing. And as for the fact that we also, collectively, appear to be sharing one nightdress, well, that’s another post entirely…

Today’s guest blogger is Vicky Sandison. Vicky is a copywriter for a toys and games company and, in her spare time, swears on Twitter.

But what about the words you hate? The ones that appear like dog turds on the pavement of prose?

I can’t speak for you, but mine are:

1. Peruse

Using the word ‘peruse’ marks you out as a hater of the English language. It is affected, self-regarding, ugly and completely unnecessary. And if you’re the sort of person who likes to ‘peruse at your leisure’, then you ought to be shot. Twice.

2. Musings

One of the main rules of the internet is to never read a blog that claims to be someone’s musings – no matter what the topic. It will be almost certainly be boring, ego-massaging tosspottery (‘tosspottery’ is a fine word).

3. Incentivise

What’s wrong with motivating or encouraging people? Why do we need this revolting arrangement of letters?

4. Beverage

It’s a fecking drink.

5. Mains

When I think ‘mains’, I’m thinking about water and electricity supplies. I’m not thinking about what I want for dinner. If you can’t be bothered to arrange your menu with imagination, ‘main courses’ will do nicely.

6. Leverage

You almost certainly mean ‘use’, so grow up and stop mouthing empty phrases.

7. Obligate

Are you a biologist? No? Then you almost certainly mean ‘oblige’. Stop trying to be clever.

8. Guesstimate

It’s still a guess. Any more compound words like this and we’ll all end up German. Stop.

9. Roll-out

Pretty much the only time this one is acceptable is when you roll out the barrel. You have been warned.

10. Competencies

Use this one and clarity ain’t what you’re good at. And you’ve just lost any chance of me becoming a customer.

So, there you go. Ten horrible words, chosen almost at random, which all make me feel the writer has scraped his nails down a blackboard.

Which ones would you choose?

Most of us say that we scratch out jargon wherever we find it, but – like any trade or profession – we have our own words that are mainly for use amongst ourselves.

We’ve been very discreet about it, though. If you search for copywriting jargon on the web, you won’t find much. That’s because we’ve managed to get most of it ascribed to the industries we work in – advertising, law, radio and so on.

But it’s ours alright. Let’s take my favourite item of copywriters’ jargon: the Seymour.

A Seymour refers to a copywriter who earns £100,000 per year or more. It was coined in the 1970s when Saatchi and Saatchi’s Geoff Seymour, writer of the famous Hovis ad (“Hovis: as good for you today as it’s always been”), became the first copywriter to nab a six figure salary.

Much copywriting slang, though, remains obscure. And I think it’s time we put it down on the record. After all, if we’re going to have a jargon, it’s important to make sure it’s better than everyone else’s.

So, if you’re a copywriter, or you have a juicy slice of copywriting slang that you’d like to share, please drop your words into the comments box below.