Bob Jones: Spare us all from cliches and gobbledegook

David Caygill. Photo / Mark Mitchell

We're awash in cliched terminology, mostly falling into two either meaningless or pointlessly clumsy categories.

The political left has always been prone to chanting mantras, often as a substitute for having nothing to say. Typical was their obsession in the 1970s with the word "fundamental". A lefty cousin of mine, then the PSA president, was incapable of uttering a sentence without including it.

Once Muldoon invited me to dinner in the Prime Minister's dining room and I regaled him about this "fundamental" obsession. Afterwards, we entered the guest section at the rear of the House, to sit a few minutes before he took his seat. As we came in, then new MP David Caygill rose. "Fundamentally ... " he began and Rob let out an almighty guffaw. Startled, David tried again. "The fundamental ... " and again Muldoon erupted. Badly rattled, Caygill had another crack and out came another "fundamental". Everyone was puzzled but afraid to buck Rob, and Caygill simply gave up and sat down baffled.

In recent years, the remnants of the old left, unable to attack the market economy as everyone now understands that it simply means them making their spending decisions and not the state, have dishonestly substituted "neo-liberalism", implying it is something bad. In fact it's exactly the same thing, but jargonese sloganising is in their blood.

Prior to the Douglas liberalisation, urban trendies such as young lawyers, academics and the like took pride in calling themselves socialists. But subsequent events caused them great confusion and they switched to the utterly meaningless "social democrat" to blanket categorise their position, only a few die-hards persisting with "socialist".

I treasure the memory in the 1990s of one prominent Labourite proudly saying on National radio, "I'm still a socialist". The interviewer then asked what she meant by that, whereupon we heard 10 minutes of what she didn't, e.g. "When I say socialist I don't mean ... ". But we never found out what she did mean. Helen Clark astutely killed off "socialist" once she became PM, only ever referring to herself, meaninglessly, as a social democrat. In line with this, taxpayer-provided state housing became social housing, to distant it from the discredited state label.

Another preposterous left misuse is the word "activist". Invariably it's applied to conspicuously non-active types such as the Screaming Skull, Harawira, and the like, whose only activism is complaining.

Likewise with the faddish 99 per cent mania two years back, which attracted a coterie of idlers and layabouts to lie in the streets, for which supreme indolence the left described them as activists. If they reflected 99 per cent of the populace, we'd be back in the caves.

Dishonest terminology should not be dismissed as euphemism. A recent example is "the living wage" cry, this in time-honoured left imitation fashion, borrowed from abroad, specifically England. While I sympathise with its objective, it's nevertheless dishonest. If low-income workers are not receiving a living wage then they must be dead.

By far the left's greatest language abuse, now confined to their extremist diehard nutters, is their outrageous misuse of the word "progressive" to describe themselves. Laila Harre trots it out repeatedly. The one thing big government, high taxes and state controls are not is progressive. History has bypassed Laila with her usage of this Orwellian double-speak.

But, speech abuse is not entirely the domain of the left. With the right it's more bad habits, such as Michael Laws who, when a politician, was incapable of saying anything without including "the bottom line is ... "

Then there's the right's constant reference to the Douglas reforms as deregulation. That's a farcical claim. The amount of highly detailed and often stultifying regulations today would be 50 times those existing in 1984. Back then, doing almost anything was prohibited so there wasn't much activity to regulate, but subsequently the bureaucracy has indulged in an orgy of costly excessive rules on every human activity.

Still, if leftish politicians are bad, they're mere pikers compared with the commercial world when it comes to jargon. Sharebrokers are incapable of speaking without including "going forward", commercial real estate agents talk of "footprints" for areas, and clear job titles are now ungrammatically convoluted. One example, and God knows there's heaps: a staff manager is now a "manager, human resources".

Another commercial-world fad is the ridiculous obsession of incorporating the word "solutions" to their activity. A Lower Hutt accounting firm brandishes this on their stationery, ironic in their case as their restructuring "solution" on my behalf to avoid double taxation liability with Australia cost their insurers $5 million.

So too the infantile naming of furnishing, cycling and other shops "city". Telecom has now idiotically rebranded their headquarters as Spark City. We know why the left misuses language - to smother the truth - but there's no excuse for the commercial sector to abandon plain speaking.