I cannot stand workplace jargon and have developed quite a reputation for challenging or ridiculing it depending on my mood.

But as much as I abhor corporate nonsense words—inane and insane in equal measure—I enjoy being challenged on my deeply-held views. It is one of the key ways I learn and grow. I was therefore delighted to see that the Bartleby column in The Economist this week addresses the upsides of workplace jargon.

Firstly, though, I need to address an error in the column:

Doctors have a private vocabulary for patients when they are out of earshot. “Status dramaticus” is how some medics diagnose people who have not much wrong with them but behave as though death is nigh; “ash cash” is the fee that British doctors pocket for signing cremation forms.

The idea that this sort of unsympathetic, uncaring use of language is ‘the norm’ in my profession is a myth. It’s the sort of language that routinely gets called out, and which gives people an unsavoury reputation.

Regardless, the column cites two main benefits of jargon.

The first is ‘creating a sense of tribe and of belonging’. This may be true, but I do not see this as a virtue. This is essentially suggesting that an exclusive culture is preferable to an inclusive one. The column suggests that knowledge of the language confers ‘membership’, which might be fine in social groups, but is really quite abhorrent in the workplace. People ought to be included by dint of their employment in the organisation, and it is up to the organisation to welcome new recruits; they ought not to be excluded until they acquire ‘membership’ of the cult.

The second is ‘practical reasons’ such as ‘increasing efficiency’. It’s hard to understand how jargon increases efficiency if it excludes some staff members and—as the article cites elsewhere—frequently leads to errors and misunderstandings.

One of the organisations I currently work for is in the process of rolling out a programme to improve wellbeing, morale and a sense of inclusion in the organisation. Let’s imagine that they called it ‘Inclusion for Excellence’, which is not a million miles away from reality. I’m now deluged with corporate communications for the ‘I4E programme’ and seemingly no-one recognises the irony.

The most dangerous jargon of all is the language we don’t even recognise to be jargon. Some years ago, I led the response to an outbreak in a prison. The health services, me included, talked about ’vulnerable prisoners’, meaning those at higher risk of serious illness if they contracted the infection. The prison services heard us talking about ‘vulnerable prisoners’ and thought we meant those in special protection due to the risk of attack from other prisoners. We used identical shorthand for different groups of people.

I concede that I’m not totally opposed to jargon: it can indeed be a useful shorthand in situations where one can be certain that everyone understands what is meant. Everyone uses it, to some degree, every day.

But it is my fervent and unshakeable view that jargon is, for the most part, best avoided. Where unclear language is used and not understood (or misunderstood) it is a failure of the speaker.

And your chosen deity help you if you ever send me an email saying, without further explanation, that you’d like my input into

an innovative outsourced supply chain solution that will drive strategic alignment as we recalibrate towards business as usual

You’re unlikely to receive the reply you’d hoped for.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

As I’ve written many times over the years, The Hoppings has descended on Newcastle’s Town Moor for a week or so in the summer of most of the last 150 years. For some years now, it has formed the largest travelling funfair in Europe.

Wendy and I went for our annual wander. A close comparison of the carousel compared with last year’s photograph reveals a 17% annual rate of inflation on rides.

I vaguely remember having a conversation with someone once about the different between the Red Cross and Médecins sans Frontières.¹

The Red Cross focuses solely on the individuals in need. It will work with corrupt regimes to get access to prisoners of war, and it will summarily ignore any wrongdoing it comes across beyond its narrow focus on the immediate needs of the people it is there to serve. This means that the Red Cross can provide care to people in some of the most extreme circumstances, across boundaries and within facilities that no-one else might ever be able to access.

Médecins sans Frontières tries to do the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people. It published reports condemning wrongdoing it has seen. In extreme circumstances, it will pull out of facilities and territories rather than be complicit in silence. This means that it can bang the drum, or threaten to do so, to secure safety and health for whole groups of people.

In practice, the Red Cross and Médecins sans Frontières coordinate to make sure that they can both meet their goals while leaving as few people unserved as possible.

This has been playing on my mind recently in the context of health protection. Sometimes, for example, hospitals have outbreaks of infectious diseases, and sometimes, they ask for my advice and support. I approach these situations in a very ’Red Cross’ manner: as in, “your secrets are safe with me, let’s talk openly, honestly and frankly, and let’s fix the problem.”

Others in my role would approach these situations from a more ‘Médecins sans Frontières’ perspective: as in, “I want you to listen to my advice, make an action plan to fix this problem and report to me on progress regularly, or I’ll escalate my concerns to your commissioner.”

These two approaches aren’t as mutually exclusive as they might first seem: even with the ‘Red Cross’ approach, the reality might be that I’d have to involve regulators or commissioners eventually if I was deeply concerned.

Yet, I see my primary role is to be a friendly independent source of help and advice to help steer things in the right direction; others in the same role see it differently.

I convince myself that my approach is based on experience and evidence, and that it’s the most effective approach for me. But I can’t deny that it also aligns with my personality and preferences, and that almost certainly colours my thinking.

I suppose my reflection is that different approaches work for different people, probably in part because they suit different personalities and contexts. There is often a drive in life to standardise things, but sometimes, greater things can be achieved through having two opposed approaches working in harmony, just like the Red Cross and MSF.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

1. The details of this might be a load of misremembered rubbish. ↩

Earlier this year, I read and enjoyed Jessica Andrews’s first novel, Saltwater. I said then that I looked forward to reading her second novel, Milk Teeth, and here we are.

I thought the first novel was particularly good on the sense of ‘otherness’ that people from the North often feel when they are in London. This novel channeled similar feelings but on a bigger canvas: instead of London, our female northern protagonist finds herself in Barcelona and Paris. The slightly disorientating non-chronological structure is back, as is Andrews’s brilliant, lyrical writing. Milk Teeth is both a love story and a coming-of-age story. It examines how relationships can help us grow, but how those same relationships shift as the people within them change.

As with the first book, I found the writing to be superior to the plot—although this time round, the plot was pretty engaging on its own terms. I found the main character’s descriptions of her relationship with food to be interesting and insightful. This relationship was a recurring theme through the book, perhaps reflecting the coming-of-age aspect of the novel.

I really enjoyed this, and won’t hesitate to pick up Andrews’s next novel.

A couple of quotations I noted down:

I bathe my knee carefully with a pan of warm water, wiping away dust. There is a big chunk of grit trapped beneath the skin and I dig it out carefully with a small twist, like a loose milk tooth wrenched from a gum, and it leaves a tiny wet hole. I roll it between my fingers and wonder how long I might have carried it around, if I had not noticed it. I imagine my skin healing, growing over the stone, sealing it inside me. I wonder if it would have got infected, or whether my body would break it down. Maybe I would have just carried it for the rest of my life, without even knowing it was there.

I didn’t know how to explain to you that I want wanted sensation, beauty and chaos but I had to swallow my basic needs so I could meet my wants because they were bigger than I could afford. I wanted to go beyond the borders of the life that was set out for me, to stand on the threshold and see the world beyond it, but stepping off the edge came with a cost I did not anticipate. I want to inhabit a space with ease, somewhere airy and light with room to grow into. I want to be part of the world instead of just skirting the edges, to feel deserving of love and care. I want to hold onto the good things tightly, to learn what it means to stay.

This is a massive exhibition by the British-Ghanaian artist Larry Achiampong, including everything from a feature-length film (showing five times daily) to a collection of (I think) twelve computer games, even a shelf of books to sit and read. One could easily spend days in this exhibition and still not see all the work. My brief visit barely scratched the surface.

Achiampong’s work explores our sense of identity. The scope is broad, incorporating everything from the way our identities can entrench inequality through class or cultural displacement, through to digital constructs of identity.

The most immediately arresting bits of work in the exhibition are from Achiampong’s Relic Traveller series, which includes a series of life-size space suits throughout the gallery. The narrative behind these is that they represent African travellers collecting the relics of their colonial past, found in the West.

I was also taken with a video installation in this series, Reliquary 2, which reflects on Achiampong’s separation from his children during the covid lockdowns. It features edited drone footage of Brighton’s ruined pier, among other sites, with cartoon space people overlaid. The audio features Achiampong directly addressing his children.

The installation Detention, shown in the photograph above, also caught my eye. This is partly inspired by the opening titles of The Simpsons, and partly reflects the way that politicians and social media posters repeat certain key phrases endlessly.

Yet, from the whole exhibition, the thing that struck me most was the atmosphere. Achiampong’s work is personal, he features his family in several pieces, and his work invites visitors to sit on beanbags or benches to watch video installations, to play computer games, to sit on maps, to take books from a shelf and read them. Somehow, whether it’s the work or the curation, the impression is unusually inviting, oddly warm-hearted. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit.

Wayfinder continues at The Baltic until 29 October.

On a recent walk, Wendy and I spotted a buzzard. Or rather, we were walking along deep in conversation when somebody came over and said, “excuse me, have you noticed that buzzard over there?”

We hadn’t, and frankly, I wouldn’t have recognised it even if it came and perched on my arm.

This struck me more than it would usually have done, as I’d only recently read a blog post by Richard Smith in which he called himself uneducated:

Recently a group of us walked through the Yorkshire Wolds. One friend knew the name of every bird, and he recognised their songs from just a few notes. He could see them when I couldn’t. He knows the names of flowers and trees. I can tell an oak tree from a beech tree—but not even that with confidence. I marvel at flowers but know the names of few.

My ignorance began to weigh heavily on me as we walked. What is the point of knowing the difference between a mean, median, and mode if I don’t know the names of stars, flowers, trees, and fish? If abandoned on an island like Robinson Crusoe—or even in my own garden after a pandemic had killed everybody else—could I grow anything to eat? I fear not.

I agree with Richard that we need to live as part of nature, but my complete lack of knowledge of stars, flowers, trees, and birds doesn’t weigh heavily on me: I’m perfectly content to simply enjoy them.

This occurred to me on another occasion recently, as Wendy and I were walking under some trees, and she wondered aloud what species they were. Neither of us had a clue. On almost any other topic, I’d have later found myself searching the web, my curiosity driving me to learn a little about it. I don’t have that compulsion at all when it comes to the natural world around us: it’s completely absent.

And I think that’s okay. I think it’s legitimate and healthy to have areas of life that don’t drive me in that way. I think it’s good for my mental health to have things that I see and wondrously appreciate, rather than analysing. It’s nice to have the freedom to appreciate the shade of a tree without being nagged by an awareness that I’ve no idea whether it’s an oak or a beech tree.

Sometimes, being at peace with my ignorance is preferable to forcing self-development.

Wendy took the picture of the buzzard at the top of this post.

Pilita Clark’s column in the FT this week was about being overwhelmed by email.

We have reached the point where the benefits of communication are being outweighed by a dispiriting loss of production.

This was confirmed by a Microsoft report last month that found workers around the world are struggling to keep up with a “crush of data, information and always-on communications”.

The research showed people are spending 57 per cent of their workday on email, meetings and other communication but just 43 per cent on productive creation.

I worry that the solution to this view of the problem actually makes things worse. In my own area of work, there is a constant push—for example—to replace written reports with online ‘dashboards.’ This would, no doubt, shift the classification of the work from being ‘communication’ to something ‘productive’, even though the actual task that is being accomplished is the same thing—just often less efficiently, because dashboards often lack clear commentary and so require lots of people to consider data separately to reach the same conclusion. The communication becomes less efficient, but feels more ‘productive’.

I think the “crush of data” is the bigger problem than the deluge of emails. We’ve reached a strange point where people have concluded that data is transparency, whereas it is often actually obfuscation. I can, in no time at all, produce statistics on the number of notified cases of certain infectious diseases. But this explains very little: declining cases might be a ‘bad thing’ if they are likely to reflect poor access to healthcare or a problem with testing. Increasing cases might be a ‘good thing’ if they reflect work done to target high-risk populations. A dashboard is often much less helpful than an explanatory paragraph, even if one of those things looks ‘productive’ and the other looks like ‘communication’.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

This exhibition aims to show three different approaches to representing nature through painting.

It opens with pre-Raphaelite paintings, showing their highly detailed, almost photo-realistic approach to capturing the world. We move through rustic naturalistic paintings, which are still fairly realistic in style but concentrate more on character and atmosphere than fine detail. And we close with paintings by British Impressionists, who forwent the realistic to concentrate almost entirely on the wider experience of the places featured.

To give you an idea of my level of ignorance, before I went to this exhibition, I couldn’t have told you anything about the Pre-Raphaelite ideals or their approach to representing the world. I therefore felt educated by this exhibition: it was very well-curated, combining clear text with a plethora of well-chosen paintings which underlined each of the points the text made.

As you’d expect, some paintings struck me and others didn’t. I usually enjoy more abstract works, and was particularly taken with Samuel John Peploe’s On the Brittany Coast and Moses Adams’s Harbour Scene at Night, Runswick.

I thoroughly enjoyed this exhibition.

‘Essence of Nature’ continues at The Laing until 14 October.

I’ve never ventured into a branch of Home Bargains (or ‘Home and Bargain’ as it was called when I was growing up in its home county). But this neat fact from Andrew O’Hagan’s latest in The LRB was startling nonetheless:

Sales at Home Bargains (‘Top Brands. Bottom Prices’) have increased by £3.4 billion. Home Bargains has nearly 600 stores throughout Britain and the company’s owner, Tom Morris, enjoys the excellent designation of being the richest Liverpudlian in history. For fans of Paul McCartney, it’s depressing to find that there’s a lot more money in disposable toilet wipes than there is in writing ‘Love Me Do’.

Well, then.

Ever with the zeitgeist, on 7 July 2018 I decided to watch Frasier, a programme which had been out of production for 14 years. I’d only ever seen bits of the highly rated series, and find it easy to squeeze 20-ish minute programmes into my life from time to time, so it seemed like a good match.

Five years and 264 episodes later, I’ve finished it. I mostly enjoyed it: it had a serious dip in quality about two-thirds of the way through the series. The characters began acting in oddly uncharacteristic ways, which made me wonder about the relationship between actors who have played characters for years and writers who come to a series later on. It also seemed to lose its humour. But the final series was worth waiting for, a marked recovery which contained some of my favourite episodes.

Of course, in the time I’ve been watching, a revival has been announced which is scheduled for release later this year. Therefore, my claim to have watched every episode of Frasier is only temporarily true… though I suppose my completionist tendencies will mean I’ll end up watching in any case.

I’ve been wondering today whether I’ve sat through 264 episodes of any other scripted TV series.

In terms of long-running comedies, I watched all the American version of The Office, but that’s only 201 episodes. I’m uncertain whether I’ve seen every episode of Modern Family, but there were only 250 in any case. I gave up on Scrubs when they ditched most of the cast, and it only lasted 182 episodes anyway. It’s possible, but far from certain, that I’ve 264 episodes of The Simpsons, though I haven’t watched it in years.

Dramas are generally more my thing. The West Wing was a paltry 154, though as each episode was twice the length, I guess I’ve spent more time with those characters than Frasier’s. Six Feet Under was, somehow, only 63 episodes. I gave up on 24 after a few series, and even if I’d seen it all, it stopped at 204.

The obvious contenders would be soap operas, but I don’t watch any of them. But I probably watched 264 episodes of Neighbours when I was growing up.

I suppose what I’m trying to confess here is that Frasier probably now occupies a bigger slice of my cultural awareness than it ought to. At least watching it was fun.