Anne Fox :: Blog :: I love jargon!

I never realised it until the last couple of weeks but I love jargon. Not for the sake of it but because it gives you defined structures within which to work when everybody agrees on what things are called. I have just been helping a colleague with the finalisation of a project application to be sent to the British European National Agency, ECOTEC, and during the discussions with the British promoter and the various other international partners it has become obvious that we do not know what we are talking about. The words partner, supporting partner, silent partner, co-financing, matching funding have all caused difficulty when we finally realised that we were using different words to describe the same thing. In the case of partners and sub-contractors definitions have serious implications for funding and we therefore needed to be clear about what we meant when we used the different terms. It has made the process of putting together the application much more time-consuming than it need have been. It makes me wonder why we ran into such problems because the EU abounds with multi-lingual glossaries of agreed terms exactly because of the potential problems of misunderstandings. A particular bugbear of mine is the use of the word municipality to descibe what I would refer to as the local council or local government. But I have learned that you have to go with the flow in these cases otherwise you waste a lot of time explaining exactly what you mean.